quickest way oflearning After Effects?

[sandman88]

hello all! just a question for you guys in the know-how. i have a very strong grasp on adobe premiere and photoshop. for the past year i have been trying to learn after effects.
all my knowledge is basicly self taught from books i purchased. i do several wedding videos a year and am convinced if i learn after effects better then the video's end result will be better.


im NOT out to learn total animation for web design. just some nifty tricks to enhance stock footage. i am getting better with the software application, however im still struggle to build my own comps. from scratch.

i started with adobe classroom in a book 5.0. what a joke that was for beginners. you gotta learn to crawl before you can walk. that book was too busy showing the software's capabilities rather then teaching new-comers. and how many new comers have a motion camera like one of the lessons use?

then i bought the after effects bible by marshal and seed.awesome book for beginners! i could see how that book could be useless for advanced users though. next up it was"after effects in production" learned alot from chris and trish meyers book but still im finding most books assumes the user knows too much.

i would find it more usefull if book tutorials forced users to build comps from scratch.most books laready have comps pre-built.

so i guess my question is: how did most of you learn after effects? classrooms? just trial and error? what is the best way to go about it? keeping in mind my main use for the program will be for live videos and not web animation.

are those expensive videos worth the price?

any feedback wouldbe great! thanx

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

After Effects in Production's entire first chapter is building a comp from scratch, using the files on the attached CD-ROM. That was super helpful to me.

I also just started reading the Adobe User Manual for After Effects. There were things I didn't entirely understand or that didn't make sense, but I just kept going, trusting that eventually I would figure it out later -- and I did!. After getting about halfway through the book, I decided that I knew enough to start stumbling around in the software.

Finally, the thing that got me learning the most and fastest way of After Effects was to pick small compositions, say, 10-second things. I would make it a point to try and do a certain thing, such as "straight drop this skull on Randolph Carter's head, then a white flash at impact, then the skull bounces off-screen in an arc, while spinning." I would bang on that sucker until I was happy with the result. Ten seconds doesn't take up much time or memory, either!

Because my current project is composed of hundreds of these little pieces, I was able to pick and choose whichever "lesson" I wanted to learn that night, plus the project would continue progressing.

For specific things, I started looking around on the web and sniffing around this site.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,


Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[eeebs]

i'd agree with edward. i pretty much learned the more
advanced stuff by designing and producing projects.
i think if you know what you want to achieve, you'll
learn how to produce it. however, it does help to work alongside other designers / animators and try pick up some techniques. the book by angie taylor is also very well articulated. also, in england, we have a great magazine called 'computer arts' which every now and then publish tutorials for after effects. these are usually put together by some of our cutting edge designers. this way you're getting a great tutorial aswell as getting a feel for the latest trends that adorn our screens. if you're familiar with PSD and Premiere, you'll be fine. just keep practising!

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

And don't forget to type "After Effects Tutorial" into Google and see what you get!

Cheers,


Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[fox6design]

AE has nothing to do with the web.

Learning AE will greatly help wedding videos, is easy to learn (like an animated Photoshop) and is great for simple editing and adding titles, names, credits, etc.. for wedding videos.

Remember that Photoshop works hand in hand... so go with a font, brush a little ditty under the text, create an alpha channel, export any title or image you do as a Targa, and open with AE.

 

[fox6design]

p.s. after effects in production, and its brother, creating motion graphics are the BEST books for AE I have seen. Also, classroom in a book is good. Sit, start to finish, bear with it. Put in the time.