Avoid Drag and Drop Templates 🚫
We know they have their advantages elsewhere, but please don’t use drag and drop templates when working with Vidsy. I
Here’s everything you need to know about why we can’t accept their use, and some great ideas for what to do instead.
What are Drag and Drop Templates? 🖱️
Otherwise known as presets, preset animations, preset packs or plugins, drag and drop templates are applications that contain pre-made animations within them that you can apply quickly to your videos in After Effects and Premiere Pro. Examples include packs from Envato Elements, Motion Bro and Animation Composer. Most of them are very popular because they’re free and quick to use and have excellent animations within them ranging from text effects to textures, transitions, 2D effects, and much more.
Why We Don’t Allow Drag and Drop Templates at Vidsy
It makes editing your work much more difficult for our in-house team.
Once you submit your content, our in-house creative team gets to work on amending it, and most templates make editing your videos very difficult for us. We often have to rebuild videos from scratch if a 'drag and drop' template has been used.
They make your videos look generic.
Because drag-and-drop templates are so popular, creators often use the same templates as other creators, making their videos look incredibly similar to each other. An easy way to stand out from the crowd is to refrain from using them entirely.
They can cause licensing issues.
Due to the sheer number of videos we create together, it’s too difficult for our small team to guarantee all assets are commercially viable. (Some drag-and-drop templates even have licensing that forbids you from using them in commercial videos!).
What to do instead ✅
We provide presets, colours and guides within the After Effect project in the asset pack for each Remix brief,
Animate from scratch
We know it isn’t the sexiest option and takes a little longer, but the best chance you have to increase your skills as a motion designer and stand out from the crowd is to animate from scratch. Motion designers at the highest level don’t use drag-and-drop templates.
Make use of scripts
Scripts are pieces of code that you can input or paste into After Effects that can automate animations, they’re a great way to save time animating layers while keeping your project editing-friendly at the same time.
Animation script that makes a more realistic bouncing ball effect
Use Vidsy-provided extensions
Extensions are one level of complexity above scripts, they can automate your animations and come with a basic user interface (UI). They are editing-friendly, just be careful of using extensions that add a ton of keyframes or pre-comps as these are a nightmare to edit us (see below). An example of a great extension is our TikTok Toolkit which helps you make native-looking TikTok text.
Our official Vidsy TikTok Toolkit is the first of many Vidsy-provided and approved extensions to come ✅
Here’s an extension we would prefer you didn’t use. Just look at the minefield of keyframes in there! ❌
Use Vidsy-approved plugins
Sometimes in a Vidsy remix assets pack we give you approval to use either one or two plugins - Saber and VC reflect! Saber is awesome for adding glowing effects to text and VC Reflect is great to use when animating pack shots. We won’t, however, accept work that is embedded with animations from any other plugins aside from the ones we’ve approved in the assets pack and mentioned here. (We’re in the process of building an approved resource for you to access).
Use your own custom animation presets
This is one of the easiest ways to automate your animations that look great and are editing-friendly for our team. As long as the preset effect doesn’t add a ton of keyframes or have a very long, hard-to-understand expression, you should be OK. All you’ll need to do is highlight each effect you’ve applied to a text layer or shape layer, then click animation then click save preset. Next time you just apply the preset effect by clicking ‘animation’ then ‘apply preset’.
Saving a drop shadow and decrease tracking effect as a custom preset.
Vidsy is there to support you every step of the way. If you need help with leveling up your motion design skills, get in touch with the community team at community@vidsy.co.
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