After Effects Apprentice (DV Expert Series) - Download

If you're new to After Effects and want to get up to speed quickly, After Effects Apprentice was created just for you. With 11 core lessons plus a fun final project, you'll quickly get into the program and learn how to tap its potential - whether you want to create motion graphics for a network program, your company's video, or your own independent production.

In this book, you'll get a professional perspective on the most important features a motion graphics artist needs to learn to use this program effectively. You'll learn to creatively edit and combine layers, animate eye-catching titles, replace a screen on a computer monitor, place a studio shot in anew environment, manipulate 3D space, and use effects to generate excitement or enhance the realism of a scene. Easy to follow step-by-step instructions take you through each technique, including projects that encourage you to express it in your own way. You'll learn more than just the tools; you'll learn skills that you can immediately put to work in your own projects.

Topics include how to:
* Animate, layer, and composite images and text.
* Manipulate keyframes to create more refined animations.
* Use masks, mattes, stencils and modes to add depth.
* Manage layers to make them easier to coordinate.
* Add 3D to your animations.
* Use tracking and keying to create special effects.
* Includes new CS3 features; Shape layers, the Puppet tool, Brainstorm, and Per-Character 3D Text.

DVD contains: All exercise source material and projects in AE7 and CS3, video guided tours, and movies of the finished projects.

* Full color presentation of professional workflows
* Core motion graphic techniques in 12 engaging lessons
* Companion DVD features QuickTime movies and lesson media

User review
Great book for beginners
This is a great book for people who are new to after effects and want to learn how to do cool and exciting things right away this book would definitely help. Tutorial are easy and straight forward also there is a lot of pictures of the menus so that will definitely help beginners in the program.

User review
A superbly written, organized, detailed, comprehensive, and presented instruction manual
Now in an updated and expanded second edition, `After Effects Apprentice: Real-World Skills For The Aspiring Motion Graphics Artist` continues to be an ideal introductory and instructional manual for the novice motion graphics artist seeking to produce professional quality work. Incorporating twelve lessons updated for CS4, `After Effects Apprentice` is profusely enhanced with screen shots, Guided Tour video training movies, and project files updated for After Effects CS4, as well as being integrated with other germane Adobe applications. Readers will learn how to animate, edit, layer, and composite both video and still images; manipulate keyframes; utilize masks, mattes, stencils and blending modes; create and animate shape layers and text; create special effects, and so much more. A superbly written, organized, detailed, comprehensive, and presented instruction manual, `After Effects Apprentice` is highly recommended for beginners and has a great deal of enduring value to offer even the more experienced motion graphics artist.

User review
Learning After Effects
After Effects is not an intuitive program, as was PhotoShop (at least for me)and, to a certain extent, Adobe Premiere. I've been frustrated for years knowing what AE could add to my videos, yet being unable to do anything about it. This book was suggested to me by someone who knows AE very well. I haven't gotten very far into the book yet, but so far this is a `5-Star` book for learning After Effects.

User review
Best book for learning After Effects CS4
I love this book, as a novice to AE, I have read others, but none compare to this, it is so easy to follow and you really get an understanding of why each button and not just the same old `how`!

User review
After Effects Apprentice, 2nd Edition
The book gives a step by step approach to gaining knowledge in using and applying Adobe After Effects, which is a software that is not too user-friendly and is difficulty to master on your own without guidance.

After practicing several chapters of worked examples, I am now able to produce work of my own. Each chapter reveals interesting new capability and power of the software. The examples included in the DVD are practical and useful.

I would recommended the book for the novice as well as the more experienced.