: What is the best technology for producing a video like this? In order to produce a video like this... http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1rjWQH/www.youtube.com/watch%253Fv%253Ddv4j4bguYYk What tool would

@Mendez620

Never used After Effects myself, but I suspect it would be just as easy in a 3D program such as Maya ($$$), Blender (free/open-source), etc. You'd just have to create images for the text, etc., set up a camera, and then animate the camera and the movement of the images. Something like this would take an experienced person about five days to make, with most of the time being necessary due mostly to the sheer number of objects that need to be added and animated.

In fact, if you look at the grass and the house swapping their z-order (due to rotation) at 1:24, you can clearly see that this was done in a 3D environment. Though it wouldn't narrow it down in terms of figuring out what exact piece of software they used to make it, it definitely proves that they're working in a 3D environment, animating a camera and rotating flat rectangles that are textured with images of text, logos, etc.

Doing this in Maya would be a rather simple process: draw the end goal image where all of the little bits add up to the Darth Vader picture, come up with a script & storyboard that would show the flow of animation, acquire all of the images (there's lots of them), create a lot of image planes and load the images into the images, and put them into position. Create a camera, animate the camera, do a test render. Animate the shown/hidden properties of the image planes, making them pop up as the camera passes, and do another test render. Then simply animate the rotation/scale of each image plane, making it rotate/scale/distort as soon as it is shown.. At the very end, you can traverse all of the nodes with MEL and animate their shader nodes to go from full color to only black. Put simply, it's not rocket science. Anyone with even a little 3D experience could make this. The process should be very similar in Blender, which is free.

I don't know if Maya/Blender are better suited than AE for doing this, but they're very capable and I doubt that it could be any easier in AE. The difficulty in making a video like this comes almost exclusively from the volume of objects/keyframes required.

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@Sarah814

Alan's answer, while technically correct, is misleading because it makes it sound like Flash is a viable option here. Using Flash for video work is simply foolish; you definitely want to use After Effects.

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@Jennifer810

While you could certainly do this kind of thing in Flash, After Effects, in combination with Illustrator and Photoshop, would be a much better tool. Cueing and synchronizing audio for this kind of project, not to mention a number of the motion and color effects, is considerably more complicated in Flash than in AE.

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