Learn how to create and animate realistic missile trails through 3D clouds using only After Effects and Particular

Create a futuristic sniper scope using After Effects expressions and null object animation.

A practical application of a layer space transform.
Not very new, but still very useful.
by Dan Ebberts's resource for After Effects scripting and expressions

Add camera shake to your footage with slider controls.
Easily change speed, intensity and rotation.

Motion designer Harry Frank demonstrates how to get around the particle orientation limitation in Trapcode Particular wherein particles always face the camera.

This is a fairly simple technique often done poorly. The trick to making the 3D extrusion look as good as possible is in the way you use a custom shape layer and the way you assign textures to the extrusion.

Earthquake effects on fullscreen video clips

In this 3.5 minute video tip John Dickinson shows how you can look through a camera linked to a light.

This example shows using custom particles. The particles are small (200*200 pixels) compositions containing a few animated solids that kind of resemble birds, bats and butterflies.

Auto-orientation towards the camera is a 3D technique in After Effects with a lot of uses. Sometimes though, it would be better if the auto orientation only affected the layer's y axis.