Customer Reviews

Flash + After Effects

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is excellent and I highly recommend it for all animators! There are many tips, examples, and workflows that show exactly how to bridge Flash and After Effects. There is a nice balance of web and video examples and how to properly prep and animate assets for each. I found the chapters on character animation and visual effects most helpful. The examples clearly show how to get the most out of parenting, puppet tools and fractals. I found the examples fun and inspiring. Unlike many books out there, the artwork and examples are well thought out and look great! The book is also well written. All examples were very easy to follow. I commend the author for this wonderful book!

Chris Jackson is an excellent teacher. His classes in After Effects at the Rochester Institute of Technology featured notes that were far easier to understand than standard books on After Effects and Flash, and I always hoped he'd write a book incorporating some of the lessons taught in his classes.
He has, and it's a winner. Most computer animation books are heavy going, but this one is easy and fun to read. There is no waste, no padding, no jargon, just solid information. It is easier to animate 'parented' puppets in After Effects and export in Flash than to work in Flash alone--the enjoyable exercises on the enclosed DVD will have you up and animating your own characters in no time at all.
I can recommend this book to anyone who is interested in hand drawn computer animation.

This book is a great introduction to After Effects and Flash. If you have experience with Flash, it will have you creating stunning motion graphics in After Effects in no time.
Chris Jackson's writing style is light and eminently readable. He doesn't get bogged down in a lot of exposition, but instead introduces the concepts needed and then gets right down to step-by-step instructions. His examples are well-thought-out and, rare for books like this, they are actually realistic.
I had never used After Effects before, but this book got me going and up-to-speed much faster than I thought I would. I would highly recommend the book to anyone who wants to get started with After Effects and motion graphics.

I recently enjoyed working through the exercises in Chris Jackson's book Flash + AfterEffects and I learned a lot about After Effects. I'm a beginner in After Effects and somewhere between a beginner and intermediate in Flash so I learned more about After Effects than Flash. Someone with less experience in Flash than me would probably learn more about it than I did. However, the book does assume "a working knowledge of the Flash workspace and an understanding of animation concepts and basic ActionScript." To give a better idea of my After Effects background: I had previously worked through most of the Adobe After Effects CS4 Classroom in a Book exercises and had viewed and practiced numerous AE tutorials on lynda.com and had very limited experience using AE on real projects. I think it would be helpful to have some basic After Effects experience before coming to this book. The book's back cover indicates a target user level of "intermediate to advanced Flash designers."

The book occupies an interesting niche in that it educates the reader on a workflow involving both products. Most books focus on only a single product and you're left to figure out your own workflow for real projects. This book shows how Adobe's two Creative Suite applications can be used very effectively together. The book will be useful for designers that are targeting either the internet or broadcast/DVD video. One might question why it would be necessary or useful to use After Effects together with Flash when Flash has the ability to do so many of effects on its own. Author Chris Jackson points out "... After Effects takes their project[s] to the next level in 2D animation. It provides Flash animators with an assortment of visual effects that are rather difficult or next to impossible to achieve in Flash." I agree. After Effects offers the animator a wealth of sophisticated animation tools and presets that are not available within Flash. And, of course, AE is a natural for output to broadcast video or DVD but Flash also has things to offer to the AE specialist.

Of course, outputting to the web carries a different set of considerations than outputting to video -which the book does address. For example, when outputting to video, one needs to consider the action-safe and title-safe regions but those aren't relevant for video on the web. File size for video is not usually much of a problem but for the internet it's crucial. The book's examples address the relevant issues thoughtfully and offer approaches that leverage each program's strengths to end up with final products that are appropriate for their target platforms.

One great example of the ability of After Effects to do things that would be extremely time-consuming in Flash is in Chapter 5: Type in Motion. The "Download Text" example in that chapter shows the use of the After Effects text scale properties to very quickly animate the appearance of text onto the screen in a variety of ways. By adjusting just a few parameters in the text's Animators and Range Selectors a set of quite different and interesting effects can be accomplished with very little effort. To accomplish the same things in Flash would require a great deal of time spent animating individual text characters. And, when done, changing to a different sort of effect would probably require a good deal more effort. In AE, very different effects can be had by just tweaking a few parameters.

Flash + After Effects, like Adobe's Classroom in a Book series, comes with a DVD that includes source footage and other assets to use while you follow along with the exercises. Like the CiaB books, this is a book that is designed as a workbook. Just reading the text won't be helpful. You need work through the exercises to get anything out of the book. As such, it's an excellent way to learn. And, if you follow the author's recommendation to experiment with the examples, you'll really extend and solidify your understanding.

In general, I found the text to be well-written and well thought out. For the most part, the tutorials were easy to follow and included a variety of topics designed to increase the reader's repertoire while exposing the reader to as many of the two programs' features as possible.

I liked this book a lot and, as I mentioned earlier, learned a lot from its fun and interesting tutorials. However, I did encounter some problems due to the fact that the book was written for CS3 while I was running CS4. Most of the time I was able to figure out the differences and work around the problems. But incompatibilities or differences did arise repeatedly which made the going a little slower and, at times, somewhat confusing. I hope that Focal Press will release a version of the book updated for CS4.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book and the included media!

Chris Jackson has hit on the right amount of technical detail and practical content to make this book easy enough for a beginner to follow, while still keeping it interesting for intermediate users. My 11 year old son and I used this book and went through the projects together. We enjoyed it very much!

Highly recommended!

Love this book! I was excited about this book ever since Chris Jackson informed me he was going to write it. I have had it for quite some time and refer to it often. I have several books about animation software but only 2-3 remain next to me on my desk. This book is one of them.

I have been learning flash in school and am attempting to learn After Effects. Not only has it been easy to understand and helpful in learning AE, but i have learned useful Flash tips. The set up and pictures helps my "right brain" enjoy the studying process.

Hi there, the reason I am giving this book 5 stars is because the content in the book about production rendering movies to DVD and not making preproduction mistakes that would cost you dearly are discussed in this book, like Production for TV and using NTSC safe colors, and using Flash more efficiently reducing file sizes when making content, plus much more like using After Effects for creating Flash files is just a great help, and what I really appreciated was the part of using a 3D camera with After Effects and using a Blue Screen with live motion video with a person and adding a mask to composite over a special effect like we have all seen in major movie productions or weathermen broadcasting, it is all explained in laymens terms, there is stuff in this book that you will not find in other books that cover this subject

I highly recommend this book. It's full of important information and is very easy to follow. My projects now have a much more polished look to them.

This is a great book if you know Flash and want to begin learning how to use After Effects. Since I have purchased this book Im beginning to feel comfortable in after Effects and it is bringing my animations and interfaces to a while new level with the mixture of Flash and After Effects. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to take their animations to the next level.