About This Book

After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques will help you toward more believable shots in many ways, but it is not intended to help you create your first After Effects project. It is the textbook that I didn't have when I taught the course Introduction to Visual Effects at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. My students were familiar with how to use After Effects but had not yet put it to work finishing shots.

If you're new to After Effects, first spend some time with its excellent documentation or check out one of the many books available to help beginners learn to use After Effects, such as After Effects 6.5 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickPro Guide (Anthony Bolante, Peachpit Press), Adobe After Effects 6 Hands-On Training (Lynda Weinman, Peachpit Press), and Adobe After Effects 6.0 Classroom in a Book (Adobe Press).

If, however, you're moderately comfortable with After Effects, or with compositing in general, and you want to take your visual effects work to the next level, read on. This book was written for you.

After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques is organized into three sections:

• Section I, "Working Foundations," reviews fundamentals of After Effects, in the context of helping you to work smarter and more efficiently. You'll explore how to make the best use of the program's core features and how to optimize your workflow. Even if you already are an experienced After Effects artist, skim this section for tips and tricks you might not have known or have forgotten.

• Section II, "Effects Compositing Essentials," focuses on the core techniques required for effects compositing: color matching, keying, rotoscoping, motion tracking, and emulating the camera. For example, you'll delve deeply into how the Levels effect and Keylight contribute to the essential work of visual effects. This section also tackles a couple of topics that most other books consider too complicated for average users: the use of expressions and how to work with film source and high dynamic range compositing

• Section III, "Creative Explorations," demonstrates actual effects and looks at the phenomena you might wish to re-create, taking observations of how these things look in the natural world. Most importantly, you'll learn how to apply that understanding to your shot.

What you won't find in these sections are menu-by-menu descriptions of the interface or step-by-step tutorials that walk you through projects with little connection to real-world visual effects needs.

Understanding Is Preferable to Knowledge

The goal of After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques is to help you understand how the world within After Effects works and how it corresponds to the physical world you are attempting to re-create.

Your goal should be to apply what you learn here to your own shots and continue to expand your knowledge. By understanding how things work, not by mimicking prearranged steps, you will truly learn to do this work on your own. Compositing is the methodical buildup of individual component steps, steps that recur in unique combinations on each individual shot and project. This book offers advice on those steps. Putting them all together for your individual shot is up to you.