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.

After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #4

We’ve recently 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, such as text and expressions. In this fourth video, we show how to master Text Animators, including Range Selectors, the secret to creating cascading animations, and more. Click on the Play Video link below, and enjoy! (For the previous video on how to create and typeset text, click here.)

(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.

On Artbeats.com: Cartoonification

After Effects CS4 ships with a Cartoon effect, which can be used to give live-action footage more of a hand-inked look. Intended as a technology demonstration for what could be done with Adobe’s new Pixel Bender toolkit, it was pounced upon by many as example of how supposedly weak the AE CS4 upgrade was (with the benefit of experience, we beg to differ). The problem was that most of the early examples of Cartoon showed it at its default (or otherwise somewhat random) settings - and effects rarely look their best at their defaults.

To counter the perhaps mistaken conceptions about Cartoon, we wrote a tutorial for Artbeats.com that gives some hints on how to get more out of the Cartoon effect. Unfortunately, after the piece was published, we realized that it might be hard to tell the exact results by looking at the scaled-down and compressed images in the PDF. Therefore, after the “more” link below we’re including larger versions of the images with heavily truncated captions. (Be patient; they will take a few seconds to download.) We still suggest you download the file from Artbeats; if you subscribe to their newsletter, you got the main image (see on page 2 of this post) for free, and in a couple of days an AE CS4 project file should also be available to help you experiment with some of the results.

After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #3

We’ve recently 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, such as text and expressions. In this third video, we show the different ways to create and style type, including tips on areas such as kerning that will help your text look more professional. Click on the Play Video link below, and enjoy!

(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.

After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #2

We’ve recently 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, such as text and expressions. In this second video, we give a guided tour of the Effects & Presets panel, showing how to use it to find and apply effects, apply and customize animation presets, and save presets of your own to help you save time. Click on the Play Video link below, and enjoy!

(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:

After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #1

We’ve just released After Effects Apprentice (2nd Edition). This book 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, stablizing, 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 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, such as text and expressions. Here is the first video, which provides an overview of the After Effects user interface, including managing and rearranging it to best fit your needs. Included is an introduction to the new Composition Navigator and Mini Flowchart that were added in CS4. Click on the Play Video link below, and enjoy!

(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.

Scene vs. Display Referred Profiles

Color management has been improved in After Effects CS4 to now recognize and compensate for the differences between “scene-referred” and “display-referred” color profiles. The short explanation is “Don’t worry - CS4 is merely more accurate now. Leave the option File > Project Settings > Compensate for Scene-referred Profiles enabled when using color management, and in some scenarios your output will now be even more accurate than it was before.” For a longer explanation, read on; these changes affect Photoshop CS4 as well.

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