Easylayers is an After Effects plugin I coded. It sold 1000+ copies since early 2021. The plugin lets you:
- Create personalisable Adjustment layers trimmed to the clip's length.
- Create 2d and 3d nulls, trimmed to the clips selected with the relevant keyframes placed.
- Add solids, trimmed to the clip's length.
- Twixtor button which reduces the time needed to apply Twixtor to a clip from about 3 minutes per clip to 30 seconds, reducing the process time by 80% on average.
In late 2020, I had started getting very invested in video editing, my knowledge in programming was also limited very limited since I only knew python at the time.
As a video editor, I was very annoyed with the process of removing dead frames to apply Twixtor to clips, it was very repetitive and unecessary so I felt like I had to do something about it.
I went ahead and learned how to make Plugins with Adobe Extendscript using Adobe's pdf documentation, as well as this website. The documentation was very limited and the community was extremely small, making it hard to find solutions when encountering issues.
After 2 weeks of trial and error, I finally had a working product.
Initially, I never had any intentions to sell this product, but when I saw how efficient it made my workflow, I decided to do so. I spent another 3 months, carefully planning the video demonstration for my product, how to sell it and market it. I was worried that since I had a very small community of people who followed me at the time (Around 160 followers), that It would get ignored, since I lacked the credibility, but little did I know that my plugin would be my break-through in the editing community.
I went ahead and posted the video demo, as well as the website selling 3 versions of the plugin with different features (one for 4.99$ , one of 9.99$ and one for 12.99$) and people loved it. Ever since then, it has stayed relevant in the community even though I have not been active in the slighltest. Most video editors are still using it to this day, making it a must-have in the animation video editing community.
Note : The website where I sell the plugin is still averaging 30 views per day, 2 years after it's release
In the tutorial of how to install the script, provided to the user after the purchase, I gave detailed instructions on how to personalize the script. It's so personalizable that there's 1440+ possible permutations of it, not even taking into account many other settings. The logic I decided on was to have variables, defined in the top of the file, that the user would play with. These variables were either :
- 1 or 0 values: Indicating Yes or No.
- Custom Values : Some effect parameters can take as inputs numbers that range 0-10000.
I have visits on my website from just about any country in the world, except for:
- North Korea : Not sure if the North Korean propaganda agencies uses After effects? 🤔
- Greenland : 🥶
- African Countries 🌍 : Congo, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mauritania, Somalia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana.
- Papua New Guinea 🇵🇬
- Nicaragua 🇳🇮
