Customer Reviews

Adobe After Effects CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a longtime digital artist relatively new to the After Effects arena and Compositing in general, I find this book to be an invaluable learning tool that I'm constantly referencing. It's very well written and manages to integrate both the artistic side and technical side of compositing and After Effects. It's not overly heavy on tutorials, which is nice, because those can be found anywhere online. Instead, the book explains by showing how and why using a certain tool or method is the optimal approach. There's often sidebars that explain the technical reasons as well.

Part of what I like most about the book is the tone of the author, Mark Christiansen. He's got a sharp wit, that's evident in his writing style and I caught myself laughing a few times which I can't say has ever happened to me while reading a book on software/design training. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking to beef up their After Effects skills and more specifically, those who want to learn compositing as an art form.

I am very very impressed by this book. I'm currently working on a video project for a course I am taking and I have to finish a number of shots with various motion graphics and effects. I'm familiar with After Effects, but certainly no master at it, so I wanted a book that focused on compositing and more advanced effects that the beginners training and books do not cover in sufficient depth. This book has come through for me big time! The thing I love about this book is that it talks about various topics and various approaches and tools within after effects you can use to solve those problems. It even talks about various suggestions for 3rd party plugins, in cases where the basic After Effects tools are lacking. It doesn't hold your hand, telling you what buttons to click, it assumes you know all that, or can figure it out. Topics in the book include keying, color correction, explosions, beam effects, smoke, fire, rotoscoping, and all kinds of other neat things. This one has definitely earned a permanent place on my bookshelf, and new status as my favorite After Effects books (and I have quite a few).

I also own the CS3 book by the same author.

Highly recommended. Lots of detailed information to be found, both for After Effects and VFX/Compositing in general.

I could probably be categorized as an intermediate user and the book seems to be at the perfect level for me. There are probably better books for an absolute beginner, but everyone else will find a reason to keep it around, even the seasoned pros.

Mark does it again with his new book for CS4 packing a large amount of his great visual effects knowledge into this new edition. The forward by Stu Maschwitz alone is funny to " Who Brings the Sex" about explaining the " money shots " visual effects artists are expected to produce daily Backing this up the books has some scripting guru's like Jeff Amsol and Dan Ebberts to get your Java/Expression fix. This is definitely the book for the serious compositor using After Effects with real world examples and solutions from a real world visual effects artists/supervisor you can not go wrong with taking your time with this book.

The Chapters I found most helpful cover topics of 32bit HDR compositing and its complex underpinnings , the always tedious Rotoscoping and Paint and the section on Creative Explorations(Light,Climate and Pyro).

Mark also happens to be a professor at FXPHD.com where you can get even more of his compositing teachings. A+++ must have for your bookshelf.

The text provides indepth explanations of many special visual techniques made possible in After Effects. It seems like a fairly advanced treatment, where ideally you have already used After Effects to some extent, and possibly also Photoshop.

One appeal of the book is how it shows differences with the way that Photoshop treats some methods. An example is in the chapter on compositing, where After Effects offers you Curves control for gamma correction (amongst other uses). Its approach is not that of Photoshop, and the comparison is useful.

For programmers, the book delves into the use of expressions, which is the coding language of After Effects. Used for dynamic situations, where you have a sequence of frames. Some readers will be reassured by the remark that this language is derived from a subset of JavaScript. However, the expression language is not as powerful as OpenGL. This may perturb some After Effects fans but hopefully you can get over it. The language lives within the frame of After Effects and is quite useful in this context. But it is not a fully fledged graphics programming language. The drawback of course with OpenGL is that you don't get the nice stuff in After Effects, so this is the tradeoff.

this book - and it's previous editions - is THE BEST book for AE out there .. i've learned so many techniques through it ... and the best thing is that mark is explaining (Why) things are happening in this particular way instead of just (How to do this kinda of effect ) which -for me- is the best way to learn and be creative with ur work because u know wut's happening under the hood .. :)

this book is my AE bible ..

The item came very quickly and the book is nothing but great, the problem was that the book came with some issues like scratches and dirty spots.

Tons of Tips and Tricks to truly understand the art of compositing. A definite buy for somebody interested in VFX or motion graphics.

To be fair to the author, it's probably a great book for those that were looking for what it provides. I was looking for more of a cookbook type of approach. In that regard, the chapter on expressions was perfect. The rest of the book, in my highly unqualified opinion, is more appropriate for people who know how to do these things but would benefit from rethinking the subtleties of their approach to improve their output.

As I said, probably a great book for the right target market, which wasn't me!