Customer Reviews

After Effects Apprentice, Second Edition

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
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Chris and Trish Meyer have done it again!

Hot off the press, I just read the new release {second edition} of After Effects Apprentice.

First of all, if you have never heard of Trish and Chris Meyer before - I can only assume you are new to After Effects. ;) And, in that case - After Effects Apprentice is the perfect book for you.

Chris and Trish publish two different books:

Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects: Essential and Advanced Techniques, 4th Edition

and

After Effects Apprentice, Second Edition

The first book, is often referred to as the After Effects 'bible' in the industry. It is in-depth, and detailed - and serves as a valuable resource for just about anything After Effects.

The second book, After Effects Apprentice, provides a strong foundation for motion graphic artists wanting to learn After Effects. It's also great for other 'new media' artists or web-developers who want to incorporate After Effects in their work - but don't see themselves as full-time motion graphic artists.

The book is concise, easy to read - and importantly - has great visuals to walk you through the process. The new release is also a great way to get up-to-speed on the new features of After Effects CS4.

This is a 'must have' book for any After Effects users bookshelf.

The authors clearly spent a lot of time carefully constructing the tutorials. Every feature has a clear, motivating example. Each page teaches several new fascinating and useful techniques. It's unbelievable how dense this material really is. What would take another author 1,000 pages to teach, Meyer & Meyer do in 300. Along the main text, the side photos illustrate the detailed steps. No step is left out. Starting with the preconfigured tutorial files lets you focus on learning each features without tedium.

I can't figure out which is more fun: reading this book, or playing with After Effects. This book is a joy to read!

When I first started out with After Effects, I tried following several online tutorials and referring to Adobe's online help and guides. I was able to create some impressive effects, but only by basically copying the tutorials, step by step. When I tried to go back and duplicate or modify those effects, it was quickly apparent I was in over my head. I could follow a precise recipe, but had no ability to improvise in the kitchen. What I really needed was a guide that could help me understand the tools in a step-by-step fashion. After Effects Apprentice is exactly what I was looking for.

Lots of software guides are dry and technical. This one isn't. Trish and Chris Meyer write clearly, and the tone of the guide is encouraging and warm, and sometimes quite funny. What I really like is that they have you do things in different ways each time, so that by the end of each lesson you've learned a number of keyboard shortcuts and different ways to accomplish each objective. More importantly you've learned what difference it makes how you do it and why you'd want to do it various ways. The authors' commitment to the idea that you learn best when things are repeated, in various different ways and in different contexts (so it doesn't ever just feel like more of the same) also means that you can work on the chapters out of order if you really want to - while some of the skills build upon what is learned in previous chapters, there's usually enough review to let you get at least what you need to have known in order to focus on the new topic. The authors have clearly worked closely with students, seen what works and what doesn't and really have thought carefully about how to help their readers become independent learners of After Effects.

Each lesson has accompanying project files on the attached CD (I found it to be useful just to copy everything on the CD to my desktop; for convenience all the files for each lesson are captured in clearly labelled folders so that they are easy to find). For everything they ask you to try, there are files to get you started, and a finished project to show you what it should end up looking like. In many cases they also have exercises they encourage you to try ("quizzlers") to go beyond and build creatively on the skills you have just learned. Overall, this is much more than a book -- it is a comprehensive, hands-on, learning system.

Minor omission: After Effects really isn't designed for doing much with music or sound, but it can do some things with them and the treatment of the topic in the book is pretty spare (it's almost an afterthought in a chapter that's focused on working with text, and there are a couple of other mentions of how to apply other topics to working with sound in a few other places). I would have liked a bit more coverage of what you can do with music and or sound in After Effects, even if it just amounted to explaining how to coordinate the use of After Effects with other Adobe Creative Suite programs that do better with Sound such as Soundbooth and Premiere.

Note that even though I'm learning After Effects on CS5 and the current edition of Apprentice is focused on CS3 and CS4, it's all still relevant, and everything covered here works perfectly. Most of what is new in CS5, in fact, has to do with rotoscoping and tracking, topics that are best dealt with when you have the basics down. This is a book dealing with the basics, and there's a lot to learn there before you can take full advantage of this sophisticated software package. After Effects Apprentice is a great place to start. Highly recommended for those who are coming to After Effects for the first time, and for those who never really sat down to learn the nuts and bolts of the program before trying out the more advanced features in a piecemeal fashion. I can't wait now to go on and work through Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects, by the same authors.

This is the first book i ever bought. I went through it cover to cover. AWESEOME!! I have bought a few books since and many of them rehash things I've learned in this book. So far my most recommended book to learn after effects as a whole. To make it work for you and be able to create your OWN work and not rehash web site stuff. I am now able to reverse engineer many things i see on TV or Movies mostly due to this book.

If you are looking to have a resource book for many techniques or to learn from a well worded and solid teaching style, this book is for you!

If your just starting out and need a good reference this book nails it. Buy it.

Adobe After Effects is one of the most powerful, amazing, and overwhelming video applications in existence, and After Effects Apprentice is the perfect guide for it. Why? Here's a quick list:

The books images show exactly what you need to see both to understand what's happening and what to do, but also to give you ideas of the possibilities of what can be done with AE. Similarly, the instructions are clear and presented in a step by step method that won't confuse and with enough style and humor so that you won't get bored. The book is physically excellent -- the layout and graphics are all one could ask for. Heck, even the binding and cover are well done; I've opened and handled this book endlessly and it is still holding up. Apparently, it was built to last as well as to look good.

Perhaps more importantly the book teaches me the way that I like to learn -- by doing. The examples are well constructed and detailed and in every one of them there was some sort of "ah ha!" moment of discovery. But the authors are not content to show you that this button does that or that that mode does this; they also explain the whys and offer ideas about how might one use these effects and activities in the real world.

Finally, I have CS5, and almost everything in this book (covering CS4) is applicable to the new software version. If you're new to AE, and maybe a bit intimidated by it, this is the perfect book.

This book is exceptionally well written by the Meyers and provides very clear and valuable instruction (with accompanying DVD files and example movies). These are the experts. Best way to learn AE, in my opinion.

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.

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"!

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.