Adobe After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques

After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques will help you toward more believable shots in many ways, but it is not intended to help you create your first After Effects project. It is the textbook that I didn't have when I taught the Introduction to Visual Effects course at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. My students were familiar with how to use After Effects but had not yet put it to work finishing shots.

If you're new to After Effects, first spend some time with its excellent documentation or check out one of the many books available to help beginners learn to use After Effects, such as After Effects 7 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickPro Guide (Anthony Bolante, Peachpit Press), Adobe After Effects 7 Hands-On Training (Lynda Weinman, Peachpit Press; available in summer 2006), and Adobe After Effects 7.0 Classroom in a Book (Adobe Press).

If, however, you're moderately comfortable with After Effects, or with compositing in general, and you want to take your visual effects work to the next level, read on. This book was written for you.

After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques is organized into three sections:

Section I, "Working Foundations," reviews fundamentals of After Effects to help you to work smarter and more efficiently. You'll explore how to make the best use of the program's core features, including the new Graph Editor, and how to optimize your workflow. Even if you already are an experienced After Effects artist, skim this section for tips and tricks you might not have known or have forgotten.

Section II, "Effects Compositing Essentials," focuses on the core techniques required for effects compositing: color matching, keying, rotoscoping, motion tracking, and emulating a physical camera. For example, there is deep discussion of how the Levels effect and Keylight contribute to the essential work of visual effects. This section also tackles a couple of topics that other books would consider too complicated for average users: the use of expressions and how to work with film source and linear floating point compositing using new 32 bit-per-channel features.

Section III, "Creative Explorations," demonstrates actual effects and looks at the phenomena you might wish to re-create, taking observations of how these things look in the natural world. Most importantly, you'll learn how to apply that understanding to your shot.
Read Comments o Download