Editorial Reviews
Product Description:Trish and Chris Meyer share fifteen years of real-world film and video production experience inside the critically acclaimed Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects. More than a step-by-step review of the features in After Effects, you will learn how the program thinks so that you can realize your own visions more quickly and efficiently. This full-color book is jammed full of tips, gotchas, and sage advice that will help you survive whatever your next project throws at you.
Creating Motion Graphics 4th Edition has been heavily revised, reuniting the previous two volumes plus adding detailed coverage of new features introduced in After Effects 7 and CS3 Professional to form one massive, essential reference. The enclosed DVD-ROM contains source footage and project files for the numerous exercises which help reinforce each concept. The DVD also includes over 180 pages of additional information, including lengthy Bonus Chapters on Expressions and Effects.
Authored in CS3,
a free web chapter written for CS4 is included with the book. * Free CS4 web chapter included with the book
* Mastering animation through the use of keyframes, motion paths, and the Graph Editor
* Blending imagery using alpha channels, masks, mattes, modes, and stencils
* Building groups and hierarchies through parenting and nested comps
* Extended coverage of type animation, paint tools and 3D space
* Advanced subjects such as keying, motion tracking, expressions, and video issues
* Includes over 180 PDF pages of bonus content on the DVD
* Extensive coverage of the new CS3 features including the Shape and Puppet tools, Brainstorm, per-character 3D text, color management, and more!
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
Good book. Very cheap binding, October 22, 2009
By
Mark Twain (USA)
Comprehensive companion book to AE. Binding is stupidly cheap. After little use, pages are falling out of the book.
Awesome, June 12, 2009
By
Shannon M (Arizona)
This is an incredibly thorough book. I am new to After Effects and this book has been very helpful in teaching me this complex program. The DVD that comes with the book is great too as it allows you to practice the techniques as you read about them. And at almost 700 pages plus additional digital chapters, you are definitely getting your money's worth.
One caveat is that if you have no experience at all with motion graphics, effects and the like, this book may be a little complex for you. However these authors also have a book called "The After Effects Apprentice" which is supposedly more basic, although I have not used it.
Takes you from beginner to expert, February 1, 2009
By
Daniel D. Orlando (Tempe, AZ USA)
This book has been traveling back and forth from my bed side to my computer desk for the last 3 weeks. In tandem with another book ("The After Effects Illusionist"), I've literally become an expert in After Effects, and recently used it produce an incredible 3-minute product demo that has gotten positive feedback from people like the former President of Sony Entertainment (now on the board of directors), the creators of DVR recording (white label manufacturer for all DVR - they own the patent), and several venture capitalists. This book helped me make that happen. I knew very little about After Effects prior to reading it, and it turned me from a beginner into an expert!
If You Need to Understand After Effects..., December 20, 2008
By
CMOS (Chicago, IL)
...this is definitely the book you'll want to buy, especially if you're on a limited "book budget". After Effects, while fundamentally not a difficult program to understand, has an enormous number of function parameters, user interface options and workflows that can cause the average Joe to question his own sanity for trying to learn AE. But, with this book as your guide and some time to tinker with the program as you are reading you can really improve your skills to a point where you're creating cool things in just a few days.
(You really need to try out the functions and examples as you go with AE; trying to learn and memorize stuff then use it later, doesn't work with this program because there are just way too many variables involved in creating motion content).
Like many Focal books, it is very well produced in terms of material quality, layout, typography and the like... and the writing is easy to understand. There are probably 10 different ways you could organize an After Effects reference book but here again I found that what was presented to me worked very well. The figure examples are plentiful where things get more complex, and the types of examples relevant to a typical AE workflow where you're doing a mix of things like animating objects to follow a pre-determined path or handling far-out text effects and background textures that seem to "move and evolve" as time passes.
If you can get through this book and not feel like you are a more capable motion graphics editor, you're doing something wrong. While I don't recommend relying on only one book to learn AE (anymore than I do with Photoshop) because ultimately you'll need a mix of books, videos and other mediums to really learn AE over time... if i had to rely on only one, this would be it for sure.
Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects, October 12, 2008
By
John N. Lindstrom (Los Angeles, CA USA)
PROS: The text book is well written and easy to understand.
CONS: The companion DVD that contains the resource files for the tutorials was defective. I returned the book and the DVD for a replacement and the second DVD was also defective. The THIRD DVD finally worked.
