Is After Effects Good for YouTube-Style presentations?

Question

Hi! I'm about to start a new channel where I'm going to make educational videos about mysterious/strange topics. I'm thinking of using an animation program for brief and simple short animations, that would make about 1/3 of my videos. Animations would be only for presenting my ideas, similar to CPG Grey's videos (a Youtuber with video style that I want to implement, particularly the visuals), not for anything serious like cartoons. It is in a power-pointish style but looks brilliant (apparently he uses Keynote but I don't have a Mac ). A sample of what I mean is here.
I also want to learn After Effects for future video editing so I thought it might be a good idea to use it for the animations and learn it at the same time. So, any comments? Do you think I would be able to use AF for animations similar to those of CPG Grey's?
Thank you for your replies!
-Arty

Answer 1

It's very hard to say how long it will take you to learn AE. AE is layer based and uses keyframes for anything you want to change. It also depends on how complicated you want to make your animation. A simple slide show timed to music takes an experienced artist with a fairly good set of tools about 20 to 30 seconds per slide to bring them in, set a keyframe for in and out, adjust position and move to the next shot. That means a 60 image slide show will take about a half hour to go through just to start. Throw in twice that much time for tweaking and you have an hour and a half for 60 slides. Now throw in any time you'll need to create any text or do any other animations - Figure 3 or 4 minutes minimum per new layer or effect, and add the time to produce the audio track and you've easily looking at 6 to 8 hours for a 60 slide show project.
The other option, record your audio track, open up something like iPhoto or the windows equivalent and select fit slide show to audio track and push go.
A new AE artist could easily spend a week doing a  60 slide show animation. Someone that's done a similar project a lot and isn't going to have to spend a lot of time creating graphics could knock one out in about an hour. If I were to tackle the job of reproducing the video you pointed us to I'd want a week. It would probably be done in 2 or 3 days, but I'd want a week. There's a lot more stuff in there than a clever script and a nicely produced audio track. This kind of stuff is not that hard but it is notoriously time consuming.
BTW, the entire video you showed us could be produced in Power Point or Keynote in about the same time, may be even a little quicker.