Create animated YouTube videos.

Animate photographs.

Spice up a slideshow with motion. Animate photos to slide in and out of frame, pan across them, and zoom in. Order clips exactly the way you want, choose how long each photo stays in frame, resize images, and customize the panning and zooming effects. For even more customization of transitions and total control of the motion and visual adjustments of each photo, use Adobe Premiere Pro.

Create vector animations.

Turn any sketch or ink drawing into an animated cartoon. Once you have your drawing, take a photo of it and turn it into a vector shape with your mobile device and Adobe Capture. (Vector shapes stay sharp at any size, so you can blow up your drawing for large screens.) Once you’ve turned it into a vector shape, refine it, add color, and animate the drawing in Adobe Animate.

Create and animate original character

A good character goes a long way toward keeping viewers engaged. You might find your marketing video much improved if a cow or chicken does the selling instead of your most dramatic marketer.

With Adobe Character Animator, create a character, or puppet, and control it with your own movements using your video camera. Then lip sync with that puppet in Animate, or upload prerecorded audio and sync it with your puppet. Then add movement.

Animate with keyframes.

Keyframes are the key to modern animation. These are markers that define the beginning and end points for changes in onscreen elements that give the impression of movement. Adobe After Effects, Animate, and Character Animator all use keyframes to identify different elements of a graphic and determine how those elements move or change over time.

If you want to do something straightforward, like show a car driving from one point in the frame to another, make it happen with keyframes. Set the first keyframe on your animation timeline where you want the car to start and a new keyframe further along the timeline where you’d like it to end.

Location is only one parameter you can change. Add a keyframe to make the car grow or shrink in the frame, rotate, or gradually disappear and turn into a ghost car. And the ghost car doesn’t have to move at a set rate or in a straight line. In After Effects, use the Graph Editor to adjust the rate of movement. To send the car down a winding road, just create a path for it.

If you’re short on time — or you’re not an artist — you don’t have to draw the car, or any other object, from scratch. Search Adobe Stock for vector images for most things you might want to animate. Explore different backgrounds, including stock footage, to make your video content even more dynamic.

Add sound.

Record voiceover narration right in Premiere Pro, add sound effects and music tracks. (Check out Adobe Stock for royalty-free music.) In the Essential Sound panel, classify your audio clips as Dialogue, Music, SFX, or Ambience. Create and apply presets to the same types of clips, unify the loudness of your clips, and add clarity to dialogue.