After Effects Apprentice: Expressions

As we mentioned earlier, we’re in the process of recording our book After Effects Apprentice as a series of training videos, where you get to look over our shoulders and hear what we’re thinking as we work through each lesson. Our latest installment is on the subject of Expressions: The ability to define how a parameter animates using instructions such as “wiggle” compared to explicitly keyframing every value.

After Effects Apprentice: Parenting

As we mentioned earlier, we’re in the process of recording our book After Effects Apprentice as a series of training videos, where you get to look over our shoulders and hear what we’re thinking as we work through each lesson. Our latest installment is on the subject of Parenting.

Parenting is a way to group multiple layers within the same composition inside After Effects. In this lesson, Chris shows how to set up a parenting chain, discusses what makes a good parent, and demonstrates several techniques using Parenting such as creating a title animation with a minimum number of keyframes, building a geometric construct, and bringing an anthropomorphic robot arm to life. Sidebar topics include avoiding a scaling gotcha with parenting, and creating abstract backgrounds using the Fractal Noise effect.

After Effects Apprentice: Type and Music

As we mentioned earlier, we’re in the process of recording our book After Effects Apprentice as a series of training videos, where you get to look over our shoulders and hear what we’re thinking as we work through each lesson. Our latest installment is the lesson on Type and Music.

One of the cornerstones of motion graphics is creating and animating type. In this course, Trish will show you how to typeset titles professionally and create your own custom animations, as well as apply and modify the hundreds of text animation presets that After Effects ships with. Additionally, Chris will show you how to add audio to your projects, including spotting “hit points” to align your keyframes and video action.

After Effects Apprentice: Creating Transparency

We’re often asked: What’s the difference between editing and motion graphics?

Although there’s always exceptions to every rule, one way to distinguish between them is the way a project is built: Editing projects tend to be arranged horizontally, cutting between different scenes over time; motion graphics projects quite often are arranged vertically, with multiple elements - including footage, text, and other graphics - appearing on screen at the same time.

The logical next question is: How do you see through one layer to the other elements underneath? This is something we’ve written a lot of articles and recorded a lot of videos about, including our most recently released courses on lynda.com. Sounds like a good time for a quick reference to them all.

Expert Tips on Final Cut Pro

Ever watch someone use (or even worse, demonstrate) a piece of software, and think to yourself “wait a minute - that’s not how you should do that…”? Then Rob Imbs of Lovely Junkie has a video for you. Rob has compiled what is no doubt years of hard-won Final Cut experience and “knowledge” into one tip-laden video of just about everything a beginner can do wrong. With a straight face. (Until the very end.) Watch it and weep. Then pass it along to an unsuspecting Final Cut Friend.

2+ Hours of Free Video Training on Shatter

Many After Effects users are familiar with Brian Maffitt, founder of Total Training. Brian also ran a plug-in company called Atomic Power for a couple of years. His Evolution plug-in set was distinguished by 1) deep controls, and 2) hours of video training that came free in the box. Adobe bought Atomic Power and integrated most of the plug-ins into After Effects, including Shatter, Card Dance, Card Wipe, Caustics, Wave World, and Colorama. Most of the controls in those plug-ins haven’t changed since AE version 4 (not CS4, but the 4 before there was CS).

What does that history lesson have to do with today? Brian has started diving into his archive of video training, with the intention of making available for free still-useful material that doesn’t fit into the current Total Training library anymore. He started by posting the 2+hours of training he originally created for the Shatter effect on Total Training’s YouTube channel. Below are all 6 parts:

Your Daily After Effects Fix

I’ve mentioned previously that Todd Kopriva’s Region of Interest blog is one of the best sources of essential After Effects information. And it still is. But a few additional sources have really blossomed as constant fountains of After Effects goodness:

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Classic Visual Effects Knowledge

Chris Zwar - After Effects power user and occasional PVC contributor - shared on the media-motion.tv After Effects list that Peter Sciretta of /Film had recently compiled the first 12 episodes of Discovery Channel’s Movie Magic documentary series. As it was recorded in the mid-90s, a substantial portion of the effects are “practical” rather than done in the computer. Nonetheless, it’s a good background on matte paintings, miniatures, stop motion, pyrotechics, and similar techniques, plus a reminder of how easy we have it to day compared to the early days of computer graphics.

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