The After Effects Reckoning

Roland Kahlenberg has been teaching After Effects for longer than most people have known it existed. So when he predicts 20 to 50 percent of users will leave the platform in the next six months, it's worth paying attention.

Not because he's necessarily right. But because someone that deep in the ecosystem is seeing cracks that casual users miss.

What's Actually Happening

After Effects has been the default for motion graphics since most of us started doing this work. That kind of entrenchment creates a particular blindness. When you've invested years learning expressions, building templates, and developing workflows, switching feels like starting over.

But tools like Runway, Kling, and Higgsfield aren't asking people to switch. They're making certain kinds of work irrelevant.

Need a quick animated background? AI generates it. Need motion on a still image? Done in seconds. The tedious work that used to pay bills, the stuff that filled junior animators' days, is evaporating.

The Dangerous Middle Ground

The people most at risk aren't the high-end compositors working on feature films. They're insulated by complexity and budgets.

It's the middle. The motion graphics generalists. The people making social content, explainer videos, lower-thirds for corporate clients. The work that was "good enough" because the alternative was more expensive.

When AI becomes the cheaper alternative, "good enough" stops being good enough.

What Adobe Seems to Miss

Adobe's AI features feel like they're playing defense. Add some generative fill here, some automatic masking there. It's useful, but it's not reimagining workflows.

Meanwhile, tools like Higgsfield are building around the new reality: multi-model pipelines where you pick the right AI for each shot, all in one workspace. That's not competing with After Effects. It's building a different kind of tool entirely.

The Actual Question

The interesting part isn't whether After Effects loses users. It probably will. The interesting part is what replaces it.

For certain work, nothing will. Complex compositing, intricate expressions-based animation, tight integration with the Adobe ecosystem. That's not going away tomorrow.

For everything else, the question is whether motion designers adapt or get adapted around.