Adobe After Effects: A Complete Course and Compendium of Features

Great book. I got Adobe's "Classroom in a Book," which takes you through exercises step by step, like following a recipe. It tells you what to do, but doesn't go far into why you are doing it or explain how AE works. It doesn't explain many effects. You get a taste, that's all.THIS BOOK goes deeper so you understand what you are doing and why you are doing it. It explains a lot of effects, modes, animation options. It is just what I was looking for to really understand AE.The book itself is very nice. It is well illustrated and printed on high quality paper.I wish I had bought this one in the first place.

Best PP reference ever! In total disbelief. I’m seriously trashing all my other PP books cause this one rocks!

After Effects is a rather specialized program for editing videos allowing one to control motion graphics and movies beyond that provided by most video editing software. For example, it’s possible to create a content aware fill, allowing the editor to remove unwanted objects from a video. It can be used to create very attractive moving titles and illustrations, and it often can be used to save less than perfect videos. But the software is not intuitive and learning to use it is difficult. I regularly find myself pulling related texts off the shelf to remind me how to perform a task.This book consists of a set of practical exercise tutorials, using After Effects and assets downloaded from the publisher’s web site. That’s the course part. Then there is the compendium. That’s more like a manual, although I found it to be a less than complete, lacking even an index in the on-line version.The problem is with the exercises. The best texts devote a lot of space to showing you where the various switches and buttons are located. Unfortunately, not only did Goldsmith not spend enough time with the interface, but, in the electronic version, some of the illustrations were too small to see and could not be enlarged. As a result, even where there was a simple instruction, it often took me many minutes to find the right button or menu. If I hadn’t already used After Effects, I might never have found those buttons. In a few instances, I had to refer to another publisher’s book to understand the author’s instructions. Sometimes I ran through the same exercise several times trying to figure out what the author wanted me to do.I finally got to a place where the book told me to apply a certain preset to a project. I could find no explanation in the book of how to do that. After spending almost three hours trying to figure out how to apply this single step, I gave up in frustration.That’s a long way of saying this is a poor book for a video editor to learn how to use After Effects.

Wow, this book covers everything you could imagine that involves after-effects with your photos. Starts with basic lessons in animation, and tells us how to alter objects, scale or rotation among other things. Things I didn’t know were really possible in digital editing. As we probably all have, I’ve seen many explanations of how to use masking in post-production editing, but this book really does a superior job, including helpful photographs, and illustrations of masking.One really fun section was on creating light in your photograph after you have already made the image. Who knew? Spotlights are covered, as well as creating ambient light and others. Shadows, too! This book reveals so much more about Adobe After Effects' capabilities than I knew.I will especially enjoy using the chapter on text editing. The book covers the usual thing like font style and font size but also involves things like “wiggly selector“ :-). And if you want to try your hand at animation, this book is certainly the one to start with. Goes into much detail yet the writer goes to the trouble of making the information quite accessible; even illustrates how to animate with puppetry.And let’s not forget 3-D, and even 4D effects which are covered toward the end of the book. Although the title of the book uses the singular “course”, I would estimate there are at least enough great material for two or three courses included in this well-done, useful manual. It will remain next to my computer for ease of frequent reference.

This book is easy to read, uses pictures to help walk readers through concepts, and is fun to read (using entertaining examples for lessons).

I am so glad I found this book! After Effects has always been a huge challenge for me and I was looking for a volume to give me the practical information without being *too* confusing or dumbing it down *too* much. This was the perfect mix… comprehensive and enjoyable, the author laid out everything wonderfully.

I have been editing for many years but I am less than proficient in AE. This has been helpful in getting me going. Definitely recommend. Cheers!!

Ben does an amazing job of laying out everything you need to effectively and efficiently learn After Effects.

I am a college professor who teaches Adobe. This is the best book I've found yet on Adobe's After Effects.

I have mostly completed the official AE course book and must say that this Ben Goldsmith alternative is a far better book. Firstly it's written by a more human human, and it's also proving to be more accurate (rather than leading you to discover the truth elsewhere). But more importantly it covers more of AE's capabilities and does so in a shorter space of time.In truth I recommend you buy this and the original, but only get this if you're looking to buy just one of the two.