After effects has a built-in plug-in that's good to achieve the pixelated look. Great. The bad news It proves a bit tricky, though, because of its controls. The plugin let you to choose an amount of horizontal blocks and an amount for vertical blocks. So when you try to have a square pixels grid to achieve a pixelated effect in after effects you’ll be likely to waste some minutes to find the right value. Furthermore if you want to add a gap between those 'pixels' using a grid on top it's likely to give you a headache.
I created a preset to make things easier. Using the layer size it calculates the right amount of horizontal and vertical blocks to maintain the square ratio of the “pixels”. It handle an optional grid to match the mosaic effects so it's possible to create gaps between the tiles, and the fps of the animation/footage.
These are some of the looks you can achieve with it:
The downloadable .zip file contains two preset: the first one is to pixelate footage, just apply it to a footage layer or to a precomposed animation; the second one is to generate random pixels, drag it over any kind of layer. Have a play with its controls. That’s it.
I added some controls to make easier to find the main parameters but if you want to change some other things, such as grid colours or blending mode, dig into the first few effects I’m sure you're going to find them.
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