Editorial Reviews
Product Description:In the right hands, After Effects can be a creatively enabling motion design tool. With After Effects 5.5 Magic, you can leverage its capabilities. Written by some of the world's top motion graphics experts, this book provides the kind of first-hand advice and practiced techniques that can improve your efficiency and help you hone your skills.
Amazon.com Review:Version 5.5 of Adobe After Effects is much more than an incremental upgrade. By improving on existing features and introducing new ones, the After Effects development team has again created a must-have version for the professional After Effects designer.
After Effects 5.5 Magic takes the intermediate to advanced user through a tutorial tour of some of these features, while reinforcing important older tools.
Featuring chapters written by such After Effects luminaries as Fred Lewis, Patrick Siemer, and Dan Ablan, to name a few, there are chapters on film resolution, logo animation, combining 2-D and 3-D layers, motion tracking, and several chapters on live-action compositing. There are also chapters on creating stylistic video distortion and creating and exporting animation for the Web in the form of Flash (SWF) files.
The last third of the book is focused on one of After Effects' most powerful features: expressions. Since expressions are perceived as "programming," many AE designers tend to shy away from them. However, mastering expressions can add a whole new level of design and animation that simply isn't possible without them. Mark Christiansen has written five chapters that explore expressions, starting with their basic usage using point-and-click techniques through more advanced techniques that use custom-written code. Mark has done a terrific job of explaining the fundamentals, techniques, and various applications, and these chapters are worth the cost of the book.
Books in the New Riders Magic series are written by experienced authors discussing advanced features, and target advanced users. Each book offers clean design, concise writing, full color on every page, and countless illustrations. After Effects 5.5 Magic is a worthy member of this important series and a valuable addition to the AE designer's library. --Mike Caputo
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
After Effects Magic, December 19, 2003
By
(Sanger, TX United States)
If you're new to After Effects, I could not recommend this book. Better to go with the After Effects Classroom in a Book.
If you are a self-starter and don't mind doing some investigating, then you may love this book. The reason I'm qualifying my praise is because I'm in the middle of it and I'm having some trouble making these projects work the way they claim to. This book is not an step-by-step, procedural kind of
tutorial. They give it to you in broad strokes, and also expect you to finish some of the projects by simply describing the last few steps in a single paragraph, so you have to backtrack and see what you've already covered, and apply it to the rest of the project.
It does teach some pretty cool things, and what you learn, you learn well, because it can be painful to figure some of these projects out. They don't hold your hand here.
At the end of each project are some brief paragraphs describing variations you can do. I expect to do these eventually. I believe in reading a book three times, so maybe by the time I've done that I'll have mastered it. They do seem to know what they're doing - and they also assume that you do.
After Effects 5.5 Magic, May 1, 2003
By craig shell (san francisco ca. usa)
This book is craip! a waste of money.
Awesome book for intermediate users, November 30, 2002
By Andrew A. Grgich (Gilbert, AZ United States)
Don't get this as a beginner's book - you'll be lost in the first example! Instead, think of this as fodder for your next work of art AFTER you have a handle on the basics. I got several great tips that created ideas that I was able to implement on my own. Great complement to the Trish & Chris Meyers AE books.
Magic is a good name, November 2, 2002
By (Greenville, TX United States)
I have been using After Effects since before Adobe bought it. I thought I knew alot, until I read this book. New ideas and concepts on animation itself and even the new stuff with expressions and 3D. Great book if you are new or old to the program. Some parts are hard to read and I saw a few typing errors in the expressions chapters, but all in all, well worth the money. I highly recommend this book.
After Effects Magic Indeed!, July 22, 2002
By Tyler DeAngelo (Burlington, VT)
After Effects 5.5 Magic is a great book for those of you who already have a minimal basis using Adobe's After Effects. This book has great step-by-step tutorials walking you through interesting and creative projects. The book was written collaboratively by well-established professionals that work with this program in the field. I also liked that this book tackled some easy to understand expression problems. I don't know how to write code, but the tutorials made it easy to understand relationships between layers and their properties with easy to understand java script.
