The world of motion graphics is rapidly evolving. Non-destructive AI plugins for artists and designers are changing how we work with footage, timelines, animations, and effects. The integration of artificial intelligence is altering our creative workflows. We are now in an era where we can automate repetitive tasks to enhance design capabilities.
After Effects is an industry-standard editing suite that content creators worldwide can use to create content; it’s popular among those who want to streamline their workflows and focus less on the technical stuff.
The bad news is that After Effects has a steep learning curve. Only some have the time to get bogged down by its technical limitations.
After Effects can help you with motion tracking, color correction, rotoscoping, and removing unwanted elements from video applications are limitless when it comes to working on your creative projects, and they can produce sophisticated works. You can create typography effects, add transitions to your videos, create 3D rooms, pan the camera around the viewer, and do much more. It can help you express yourself artistically and transform your static traditional media into dynamic and moving works of art.
The good news is that, with the introduction of AI plugins for After Effects, you can now speed up your editing and production workflows. You can automate tasks like rotoscoping, color correction, and object tracking and analyze your video footage intelligently.
You can generate images from the editor and add them to your timeline. You can quickly enhance your creative decision-making and decrease project delivery time. You can also reduce rendering times by optimizing AI-generated images and videos. After Effects can also help you fill areas where objects are missing with content-aware filling. AI plugins can help you extend backgrounds and generate missing details. They can suggest creating custom animations and help interpolate frames to create smoother transitions automatically.
You can integrate 3D elements into 2D environments and vice versa. Generative AI plugins will continue to enable artists to bring their visions to life, allowing greater precision and efficiency.
Top 10 AI Plugins for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Other Creative Suites
Here are the top 10 generative AI plugins at a glance:
Generative AI plugins will improve your motion graphics production and design work. The larger your projects, the more complex your workflows will become. It can be challenging to make iterative changes, and lengthy render times are an issue.
AI plugins can speed up the animation, pre and post-production, and editing processes.
You don't have to wait for offline renders to preview or create assets from scratch. Using text prompting, you can generate video assets and modify and refine designs on the fly.
What are the results? More dynamic and polished creative outcomes (plus you save time!) Now let’s explore these AI Plugins below:
1. Imagen by ModelsLab - A Complete Suite of Image Generation and Editing APIs
ImageGen by ModelsLab is a text-to-image API that lets you generate images straight from After Effects. You can bring your ideas to life in seconds. ModelsLab's API can fill in gaps and expand your images quickly with AI-based content-aware filling. You can create AI avatars and swap faces with the Headshot API. If you are working in motion graphics and video editing you can generate a wide variety of textures with Imagen and apply it to different areas in your videos. Imagen can be integrated as a plug-in to Photoshop, DaVinci, Adobe Premiere Pro, and other creative suites. Flux is live on ModelsLab, and the ImageGen API creates high-quality images using stable diffusion.
Stable Diffusion also comes with various Imagen AI models you can fine-tune and train or use to generate screenshots, photos, backgrounds, and other types of visuals for your projects. ModelsLab’s premium plans are perfect for enterprises with high traffic needs and for any creative firms that want to scale up quickly.
You can make perfect background changes for professional results and remove unwanted objects from your footage.
The virtual try-on and fashion API will let you instantly see and try outfits. You can upgrade your style with virtual fitting, take before-and-after shots, and see how different clothing items, accessories, and details look on you. You can experiment with skin tones, ages, genders, heights, and body types. ModelsLab Interior API can also help you with interior design for your creative projects.
You can upload your raw sketches to it and it will produce finely detailed renders in different views. The logo generator will help you with your branding needs and you can incorporate it with your typography animations.
All it takes is a bit of text prompting. You just have to tell the AI what exactly you want. You can even change or play around with the colors, tones, levels, contrast, and other visual adjustments.
Using Imagen, you can even clone faces, subjects, and other elements from your photos.
The ModelsLab community has a vast library of image and media assets, so if you run out of ideas or need inspiration, you can join the community and check it out. Over 300k users are already creating art using ModelsLab image generation, so you want to take advantage of this. ModelsLab has a 100% refund policy if you are unhappy with their services.
Features
Unlimited image generation capabilities
Up to 15 parallel generations
ControlNet gives you precise and creative image generation capabilities.
Upscale your content with super-resolution and enhance your images to 8k
Supports up to 77-character word prompts.
Clones face, does style transfers, and creates objects for photos
Get higher resolution on your images and improve the clarity of your visuals.
Fills objects, repositions elements, and extends backgrounds
Can crop, mirror, trim, resize, color grade, and color correct
Generates characters and virtual avatars for animations, films, AR/VR, and games
Pros
Great for content creators who want to expand their creative repertoire.
Includes image editing API, Facegen API, Headshot API, and more
Can generate product photos, depth maps, and 3D assets or projects
It can also be used for AI deepfake creation
Tremendous community support, Imagen AI models, templates, and resources
Cons
None as of the moment. Currently, it’s getting better with user feedback and evolving.
2. Depth Scanner
Depth Scanner lets you create depth maps from your videos and images. It can generate plain, dark backgrounds and is best used in complex scenes. You can add depth by panning away the camera, controlling your drone and city-shot scenes, and capturing plenty of detail. It produces pretty usable results straight out of the box for single portraits. The AI plugin can stabilize your depth maps and extract finer details. You can preview the changes in real-time on your viewport and finalize the edits. There's also Depth Scanner Lite, a slimmer variant of the original plugin. You can use your resulting depth maps for various post-processing tasks like converting footage to stereo 3D, adding fog, and using multiple image effects. You can add parallax movements, depth-of-field, depth-based transitions, and more!
Features
Generates Z-depth passes for any photo or video
Slicing mode and soft border settings
Fast renders
Temporal smoothing
GPU acceleration
3. Blace
You can use the Blace AI plugin to blur faces and sort them by size. You can also exclude masks and mask custom areas for blurring out. You can also blackout faces; the plugin gives you granular control over which areas you want to blur. It's excellent for censoring video content.
You can choose between face and eyes, which will position the mask accordingly. You can also rotate your face masks with your face's contours. Scaling and expanding sliders let you define the size and expansion dimensions of the masks. There are some differences between the Premiere Pro and After Effects plugin versions.
You can define mask areas with the midpoint, wi,dth, and height sliders. You can visualize your masks by enabling the ng draw m, ask,, and turning it off for rendering. You can try a demo before purchasing.
Features
Automated compositing and face masking
Control over detection areas and can exclude directions.
Multiple customizable styles and detection sizes
4. Generative Extend AI
Has there ever been a scene in your footage where you wanted to delay the pause or freeze the frame for a few seconds?
Generative Extend is an AI plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro that lets you extend your footage by up to two seconds and your sound clips by up to 10 seconds.
You can freeze your shots, and it does a good job.
There's nothing worse than having your scenes cut short, so if you have gaps in your video editing projects, Generative Extend AI is the plugin to use.
It's straightforward but available for Premiere Pro (beta).
Now, there are a few requirements. To be able to use Generative Extend on your timeline, you will need:
Video clips of 720p/1080p resolution, 8-bit, SDR
Mini clip length of 3 seconds
16:9 aspect ratio
12-30 fps
Features
Adds 2 seconds at your clip's beginning or end.
It holds shots between clips, creates dramatic pauses, and adds extra buffer.
You can create looping footage and produce AI-generated frames like your original sample sources.
5. Adobe Firefly
Adobe Firefly is an AI image generator for your creative suits. It's noted for its helpful artistic styling options and can create art and faux photography. It integrates with other Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.
Firefly is trained on Adobe stock images and assets in the public domain, including those with expired copyrights. It can help extend the backgrounds of existing pictures or position objects differently in photos.
The downside is that it can't generate images of celebrities and branded products; you can only build simple scenes or objects with it.
Features
Has a nice range of preset styles and effects.
It can match the structure or style of your uploaded photos.
Offers multiple aspect ratios. Your content won't be used to train Adobe AI.
It runs on two AI models and can mimic the style of your uploaded photos.
6. I Ate Mushrooms
If you want to create bizarre abstract and hypnotizing animations from text descriptions, then I Ate Mushrooms is your ideal AI plugin. It's a neural network-based image generator with thousands of predefined object categories and can create hallucinations based on your footage.
Features:
You can create simple patterns, objects, and other content.
You can create images from text descriptions.
It can produce trippy interpolations based on your footage.
It can generate living beings to fuel your video creations.
7. Neural Enhancement Suite
Neural Enhancement Suite is an AI-powered toolset for AI-based video enhancement for After Effects. It's compatible with Premiere Pro and After Effects 2023, 2024 and up versions. You can recover details from extremely noisy videos, colorize still images, and extract styles from reference frames. You can color grade your shots based on the example images you provide. It also has two advanced super-resolution models for up to 16x pixels.
Features
You can enhance underexposed photos and not lose contrast.
Any details lost due to high contrast in your photos can be recovered with HDR remapping.
It can also reduce and remove motion blur with its de-blurring feature.
8. Concept Buddy
ConceptBuddy is an AI assistant that helps you with your design workflows. It interacts with your AI renders in real-time and can quickly design packshot concepts. You can iterate with sketches and create VJ loops. ConceptBuddy was developed by BSKL, the creator of Diffuse AE, another After Effects AI plugin.
ConceptBuddy works differently from other AI image generators. For example, you can use text prompts with the other AI image generation plugins, but with ConceptBuddy, you must lay the groundwork for your image creation.
Unlike platforms like Midjourney or ChatGPT, which can generate images from text prompts, ConceptBuddy will rely on your user inputs and base its outputs on those. This gives you more control and consistency over the creative process.
Do you want to build a desert scene for your After Effects project? It should include a cactus, sky, and desert background landscape. You begin by creating solid-color layers and shapes for those elements. Label each layer after you're done. You can then tell Concept Buddy what you need.
Ask it to bring your scene to life using your shapes and layers as your foundation. Enter a prompt saying that you want to turn your shapes into a desert scene, and Concept Buddy will magically transform it. You can also change the positions of your objects in the scene and play around with their alignment with the horizon. You don't have to generate a new prompt for changing the position of your desert objects. So, if you want to move it around your cactus, you don't need to write a separate prompt. Concept Buddy will dynamically generate the scene and reflect changes automatically when you want to move it around. The same goes for your skies and surrounding background elements.
Features
You can change and fine-tune the reflectiveness of your layers and shapes in the act sequence.
It has strength settings, drawing on your edit layers' guidance.
Concept Buddy offers an extensive range of seeds to allow for diverse outcomes.
There are options for writing prompts and selecting models.
The XL option can access larger databases for more extensive image generation possibilities.
9. Mask Prompter 2
Mask Prompter 2 quickly generates efficient mattes for your After Effects projects. It's next-gen AI-powered rotoscoping. It now includes Segment Anything to Image models, which you can use to get tedious work done and features.
You can use natural language to describe the objects you want to key. Its "refine matte" feature is handy. The workflow is super simple. You just specify the points and rectangles on and around the object. Mask Prompter 2 will automatically create a matte using your prompt. It only runs on After Effects 2022 and higher. It is available for Windows and Mac OS. You also need Nvidia GPUs to integrate it and use it.
Features
You can enjoy interactive prompting, allowing for fine-grained selections, refinement, and easy tracking.
It has multiple output modes.
You can output your mattes as overlays for visualization, black-and-white mattes, or content with transparent alpha channels.
10. DeepClear
DeepClear is an advanced AI video enhancement plugin for After Effects. It can enhance image details, reduce noise, and improve image contrast. It can also fix defocus blurs and remove motion blurs.
It can analyze your images' textures, structures, and stylistic features and retouch them to produce good perceptual quality. You can sharpen your images naturally, such as portraits, texts, and cartoons; it won't create artifacts or halos.
AI denoising can remove noise from your images and keep all your details intact without blurring your photos. Its performance depends highly on your GPU; any GPU cards before 2012 are unsupported. DeepClear is available on both Windows and Mac. It integrates with Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro.
Features
It improves image quality and enhances details
Reduces noise and can deblur
Eliminates motion blurs and enhances videos
Sharpens general images and doesn't cause any artifacts or halos
Fixes low light conditions and high ISO settings
Boosts image contrast and preserves the naturalness of your images using its advanced histogram equalization algorithm
Conclusion
So now you have a clear idea of how to use these AI plugins in different ways. We recommend starting with ModelsLab Imagen for your content creation needs. Play around with these plugins and see how they work. The significant part is they are light on the technical documentation so the learning curve is manageable. Install these plugins, try them out on your latest videos or Photoshop projects, and you'll be pretty surprised with the results. AI has come a long way, and we expect some serious improvements to come along with generative AI plugins like these. Let's look forward to a future of brilliant photography, art, content creation, and motion design.
FAQs
Are all these AI plugins free, or must I pay for them?
Some of these AI plugins are free and come with a free trial. Some require a premium plan, but they are worth it because you get a complete suite of editing, post-production, and pre-production features.
Which plugin should I start with?
You can start with ModelsLab Imagen because generating assets for your content is essential. It can also color-correct, edit photos, upscale, and more. When you use Imagegen, you get a complete suite of creative capabilities, unlike the other plugins dedicated to specific tasks and projects like masking, color correction, or generating images.
Why should I use these AI plugins?
You need to start to speed up your content production workflows. Although it's true that just copy-pasting AI-generated videos can get your content flagged, these tools are designed to help you with your editing and content creation needs. You can use them creatively in various ways to fuel your projects. Your only limit is your imagination.
For example, masking manually or color correcting can save you hours. All it takes is a single text prompt and a few clicks, and that time can be used to focus on other creative endeavors. Which AI plugin you use will entirely depend on your needs as a content creator.