After Effects Apprentice Free Video: Arranging Layers

As we mentioned earlier, we’re creating a video training series based on our popular beginner’s book After Effects Apprentice, which progresses from “I haven’t used it before” through core skills including keyframing, masking, text animation, and 3D space to advanced techniques such as motion tracking, green screen, and expressions. The second course is based on the Basic Animation section of the book, where we guide you through creating a simple project from importing sources to arranging and animating layers through rendering.

After Effects Apprentice Free Video: Editing Interactively in the Composition Panel

As we mentioned earlier, we’re creating a video training series based on our popular beginner’s book After Effects Apprentice, which progresses from “I haven’t used it before” through core skills including keyframing, masking, text animation, and 3D space to advanced techniques such as motion tracking, green screen, and expressions. The second course is based on the Basic Animation section of the book, where we guide you through creating a simple project from importing sources to arranging and animating layers through rendering.

After Effects Apprentice Free Video: UI Overview

As we mentioned earlier, we’re creating a video training series based on our popular beginner’s book After Effects Apprentice, which progresses from “I haven’t used it before” through core skills including keyframing, masking, text animation, and 3D space to advanced techniques such as motion tracking, green screen, and expressions.

As is the case with most of our video training, these videos are being offered through lynda.com. For those who don’t already have a subscription, they regularly make a few of movies from each course available for free on their site as well as on YouTube. We want to make sure our PVC readers are aware of these resources.

After Effects Apprentice: The Video(s)

Many After Effects users know us for our books Creating Motion Graphics (CMG) and After Effects Apprentice (AEA). CMG is intended as a deep reference for After Effects, while AEA is structured as a series of lessons to help a beginner or part-time user get up to speed more quickly with the key features of the program in a real-world environment.

We’re very excited to be taking the lessons in After Effects Apprentice and recording them as a video training series for lynda.com. Videos allow us to better explain what we’re thinking when we choose a particular tool, effect, or parameter value - it’s like being able to look over our shoulder and listen in on our brain as we work, and better conveys both the technical and creative process we go through. Not being restricted to the page count of a printed book also allows us to expand more into related features and techniques, and actually work through the Idea Corner and Quizzler challenges sprinkled throughout the book. We feel this additional background will make these videos useful both for people learning on their own, and for instructors who use AEA in their class.

On lynda.com & Cineversity: CINEMA 4D + After Effects

Maxon’s CINEMA 4D is our 3D application of choice because it integrates so well with our main tool, Adobe After Effects. Although we’ve written about it and demonstrated it in sessions and classes, we never got around to creating a comprehensive course on the subject - until now.

We’ve released an hour and a half course through both lynda.com and Cineversity. In addition to the traditional techniques of transferring camera and light information and creating hold-out mattes, we also discuss at length how to better blend new graphics created in After Effects into your already-rendered 3D world from CINEMA, including lighting effects and shadows. We also take a side trip into the wonders of multipass rendering, including the ability to alter 3D lighting, shadows, and reflections after the fact. Along the way, we also discuss other important issue such as frame rates and pixel aspect ratios. The course comes with exercise files (premium subscribers only at lynda.com; for Cineversity members, the files are connected to the second movie in the series).

If you’re not a member of either Cineversity or lynda.com and want to check it out, you can get a free 7-day all-access pass to lynda.com by clicking here. A few of the movies are also available there for free preview.

The content contained in our books, videos, blogs, and articles for other sites are all copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.

After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #8

Earlier this year we released After Effects Apprentice (2nd Edition). The DVD-ROM that comes with the book includes an hour and a half of video tutorials that provide gentle introductions to major features inside After Effects. We are releasing these videos one per month here on PVC; they are also being made available on Focal Press’ web site - make sure you visit their After Effects micro-site for more related freebies.

This tutorial will help you get started with setting up the motion tracker and stabilizer built into After Effects. Although this video uses AE CS4, the tracker’s controls have been largely unchanged over the last several versions, so this will also be of use to those using other recent vintages of AE. The tracker in AE is much-maligned (and AE CS4 now comes bundled with mocha for After Effects as an alternative), but once you know the secrets of how the track points work and how to set its options, it works fine for a large variety of shots.

(Note: For those who are hearing-impaired, lynda.com has added Closed Captioning to these tutorials. They are available here. We are also in the process of creating video training for all of the After Effects Apprentice lessons; they will also appear on lynda.com. If you do not have a lynda.com subscription, click here for a free 7-day pass.)

After Effects Apprentice was designed for students looking to learn After Effects from scratch, as well as those who do not use AE full time (such as editors or web designers). It starts gently with an introduction to keyframing, and progresses through the important features (such as masks, mattes, effects, text, audio, 3D space, shape layers, expressions, parenting, and building advanced hierarchies of compositions) until you end up keying, stabilizing, and compositing a shot in high def. The second edition has been fully revamped for After Effects CS4, and includes integration with Photoshop CS4 Extended and Flash Professional CS4.

The content contained in After Effects Apprentice - as well as the CMG Blogs and CMG Keyframes posts on ProVideoCoalition - are copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.

The Differences Between AE CS3 and CS4

The short version:

A free chapter by us outlining in detail the differences between After Effects CS3 and CS4 - with project files - is now available on our publisher Focal Press’ web site.

The long version:

Key Concepts from the Archives

We have written numerous articles and columns for a variety magazines over the years, including our previous long-running “Motion Graphics” column in DV magazine plus currently a monthly “Tips n Tricks” article for Artbeats.com.

It is our intention to move the “key” articles in this archive (with updates, where appropriate) over to this site to ensure you have reliable access to them in the future. Although some were written years ago, they still contain useful tips and concepts on both technique and design. We will also be adding new articles as subjects come up; shorter takes on subjects will appear over on our Creating Motion Graphics channel.

If you can’t find an article on the subject you’re interested in, let us know in a “comment” to this post. Also, there’s always our books Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects and After Effects Apprentice. You can see summaries of these - including samples - on the books page of our website.

The content contained in our books, videos, blogs, and articles for other sites are all copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.

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