Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects (With CD-ROM)

Rating:
Summary: Giving yourself a good start.
Review: Since i went through the lessons in this book, my understanding in after effects has increased dramaticaly. For me as a beginner this book is a huge help. When i read the other reviews complaining about prices..i think that is not the authors fault and should not belong here. With the Mac/PC images displayed..i had no trouble with it. The supplied CD is a playground and offers a lot of material to exercise with. The plug-ins are a nice bonus. Yes, the blue-screen is handled in a chapter and addresses the beginner and experienced. But to get a deeper knowledge about blue-screen i must look around for a book that describes this topic as a whole book. All in all..I'm very satisfied. Good work Trish and Chris!

Rating:
Summary: You can't ignore this book if you work with After Effects
Review: After Effects is the Photoshop of motion graphics. Whereas Photoshop is covered by many books, very few do cover After Effects, let alone so well as this book does. Insights, techniques and some great examples are all there. The novice user will be delighted to learn how powerful this tool is. Most of the experienced users will be surprised to learn how little he/she knows. And nearly everybody will be happy to have this book in their hands.

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Summary: Motion Graphics with AE is Perfect
Review: "Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects" is a rare tome indeed. The book is an indispensible reference library that can be referred to when in a bind. The book acts as a great addition to Abobe's documentation, but takes the concept a step ahead.

The book also allows the AE user to add new skills and tricks to their bag. The book's elegent design is intuitive and cross-referenced and allows for learning in a myriad of ways.

CHAPTERS: The chapters are laid out in a logical way covering the broad aspects of AE. This allows the user to pick up the book and brush up on features that they need to learn or might have forgotten.

IN CHAPTER TUTORIALS: The authors also supply tuorial artwork and movies on the accompanying CD-ROM, allowing the reader to follow along with the concepts in each chapter. This is done without excluding people who might just want to read and learn without doing.

CD-ROM PDF TUTORIALS: These are my favorite. The authors have chosen some great effects that you see on current TV everyday, and they have broken them into tutorial Adobe PDF files on the CD. The files are listed according to difficulty in the book, and are tagged "Step-by-Step" or "Guided Tour." The simple presence of these is great, but the fact that they are beautiful designs make them extraordinary.

On top of all of this, the books also supplies a neat little history of the After Effects team originating with their days at CoSA.

All in all a terrifically designed book by a couple of terrific motion graphic designers, Trish & Chris Meyers.

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Summary: Important updates on sample chapters, errata, and versions.
Review: First, we would like to say Thank You to all those who havealready bought this book, and made such positive comments about it. Weset aside our graphics business for nearly nine months to pour everything we knew into this book; it is very gratifying to see it so well received. We'd also like to thank the publisher, CMP Books, for recognizing the value that graphic design professionals would place on a full-color book and going the extra mile.

Second, a sample chapter and a Table of Contents is available for download. We are also maintaining an update and errata page for the book, pointing out typos, errors, and clarifications as we or readers find them, and noting differences between the various printings of the book. It is located at Cybmotion.com.

Finally, there have been some comments about our choice to make all the projects based around version 4.1 of After Effects. This significant update was released in late 1999, and Adobe is charging a modest $50 for it. More importantly, we intended this book to reflect our own professional experiences. And from that perspective, we would recommend against anyone using version 4.0 - it has known stability issues, especially in the area of memory management. While it might appear that saving the projects using 4.0 and 4.1 would be an easy process, it would have meant creating two different projects, and having to annotate the differences in both versions (omitting features that are new to 4.1 as needed). We were concerned that this would only serve to potentially confuse the reader, and would have delayed the release date.

So get that version 4.1 update. While you're waiting for it to arrive, remember that there is a free demo version of 4.1 for Mac or Windows included on the book's CD.

We hope you enjoy the book, and feel free to send us your comments/errata/wishlist to: [e-mail]

Trish & Chris Meyer END

Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT BOOK
Review: I have been teaching and animating w/ after effects for 5 years. This is the best book available on after effects because it offers very clear and insightful technical advice that can only be gained through years of experimentation and involvement in the motion graphics industry. IT IS A PRICELESS INVESTMENT. I require all of my students to purchase this book.

Rating:
Summary: Really good book ... Bad call on including only v4.1 files
Review: I am sure this is the best book on After Effects ever produced. However, its only shortcoming (and this is a BIG one), is that the authors chose to only include files for the 4.1 version of After Effects. So, unless you are willing to install a DEMO version of After Effects over your full original version, you will be unable to use ANY of the project/tutorial files.

If not for this fact, I would have given the book 5 stars. Actually, I would have given the book 5 stars if the authors had indicated this fact on the cover, or anywhere you could find it before purchasing. A very sneaky (and perhaps last minute) tactic by either the authors or the publisher...

Rating:
Summary: It's a great book but.....
Review: I hope the author can save the tutorial files in AE "4.0" version!

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Summary: Great information, ideas and inspiration!
Review: These two have a lot of information for anyone interested extending their knowledge in DV. I've talked with Trish via email, and that lady is great! She has so much to offer and so does Chris. It is sad that the format is 4.1 but you don't learn anything by opening up someone else's work. DV and anything else is learn by doing. After Effects on Windows! The Mac is the only way to go for DV, remember Photoshop and many of the Adobe products were written for Macintosh and then eventually written for Windows. It doesnt cost $30,000 dollars to get a system going. Use this book and the knowledge in it and expand your horizons. A firm 5 stars for this book! Hope they do another book soon!

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Summary: Particle playground
Review: ...and i thought i knew AE...It's the best book in town but i would like to see in depth information about the Pplayground, i know that Trish mention the manual of the PB but i'm in Portugal and the Adobe here behave very bad to say the least so i don't have it.

Rating:
Summary: More disappointed than most...
Review: If you don't have an AE manual, then you need this book. Otherwise, I find some serious shortcomings with this book.

First, it's as if the dominant Windows platform doesn't exist in Ms. Myers world. There are NO Windows screenshots and, even worse, no Windows keyboard shortcuts. You have to hunt them down in your AE manual and then write them in the margins of the book.

Second, all the project files are in 4.1 format so you can't see any of them if you have an older version and nowhere in the description of this book does it say that this book is targeted at version 4.1. This wouldn't be so bad if she didn't refer so heavily to the Project files. They are reffered to in almost every paragraph of the book.

Third, while I enjoyed the step-by-step tutorial files on the CD in pdf format, I would have liked to have seen some nice step-by-step tutorials as chapters inside the book. This could have taken the place of sections like the "History of the After Effects" if they were short on pages.

Fourth, the pages are way to cluttered. Any designer will cringe at the lack of white space. It feels like you are reading a newspaper and it can sometimes be difficult to follow a train of thought.