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With the slow but fairly sure rollout of Internet broadband access, Flash MX’s welcome new ability to playback movies with the plug-in, and the amazing popularity of QuickTime (see Microsoft and Real, people do give a damn about quality), it is now time for Web designers to pay attention to products formerly thought to be the exclusive concern of digital filmmakers.
With Adobe After Effects 5.5 there are a couple of added incentives to try it out now—the timeline will already be familiar to those of you who have used their excellent LiveMotion 2 Flash design software, and After Effects now exports Flash movies.
Another consideration is that although After Effects appears to have many of the same image manipulation functions as its close stable mate Photoshop, it applies them to still images and movie footage in a non-destructive manner that is easily re-edited and reapplied. This is one of After Effects’ pleasant little secrets. The other one, though less unknown, is that version 5.5 runs natively in Mac OS X.
Despite the growth in popularity that now seems inevitable once the word gets out, few books have been published on the product, and fewer still are generally available. That may change as After Effects becomes relabelled as software for the Web as well as digital video and motion graphics.
Meanwhile there is nothing better than a Peachpit Visual QuickPro Guide to get you started in After Effects.
The Book:
- Title: Adobe After Effects 5 for Macintosh & Windows
- Author: Antony Volante
- Publisher: Peachpit Press
- Published: 2002
- Pages: 594
- Illustrations:
- CD-ROM: Yes
- ISBN: 0201750430
- Rating: 4
The Chapters:
- After Effects: The Big Picture
- Importing Footage into a Project
- Managing Footage
- Compositions
- Layer Basics
- Layer Editing
- Properties and Keyframes
- Playback, Previews, and RAM
- Mask Essentials
- Effects Fundamentals
- Standard Effects in Action
- More Layer Techniques
- Keyframe Interpolation
- 3D Layers
- Complex Projects
- Production Bundle Techniques
- Output
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