Comments

kentwolf wrote on 5/16/2009, 8:21 PM
The best thing I have seen is on Lynda.com, they have various levels of AfterEffects training.

I bought the complete ground up training as well as an intermediate level one from Lynda.com. No question about it: It will take you from the rudimentary basics pretty much as far as you want to go.

You can pay a pretty low fee on the Lynda.com web site and use whatever training you want without having to buy it. It's a pretty good deal.
Ros wrote on 5/16/2009, 8:28 PM
You might want to check:

http://www.videocopilot.net/

they have a lot of free tutorials as well

Rob
jabloomf1230 wrote on 5/16/2009, 9:16 PM
Video Copilot easily has the best AE tutorials. Work your way through all of them and you will understand just about every feature in AE.
farss wrote on 5/16/2009, 9:25 PM
All of the above is very good advice however your questions are very broad and the full answers could run to a lot of typing.

Getting things in and out of Vegas, simplest way I fall back to is to render things out. AAF seems to sorta work but you may have to clean up a bit of mess in AE whereas rendering out with an alpha channel will always work.

I suspect your real problem is you understand what the tools do, you know where you want to get to but cannot fathom how to get there. Simply "doodling" is a good idea, just mess around and have some fun without any pressure. I've had AE since CS2, I needed it simply to do format conversion. It's only been in the last few months I've really made the time to explore it. I've not taken on any paying job that I had to do using AE although in the end I've done a few but I knew if it fell over in AE I could fallback to Vegas.

I have thought a "AE tutorial for Vegas users" from VASST would be good. There's some real gottchas in AE compared to Vegas that really had me going for a while. Nothing wrong with Vegas or AE, just a couple of things that work quite differently.

Bob.
Steve_Rhoden wrote on 5/17/2009, 12:32 AM

I also would recommend you take a look at
videocopilot.com.....
(Incredibly resourceful).
Derm wrote on 5/17/2009, 4:58 AM
Another vote for VCP, I hadn't got a clue what to do in AE until I started watching their tutorials, it's a deep program.
Digital juice have a few tutorials also.

Derm
Opampman wrote on 5/17/2009, 8:31 AM
"I suspect your real problem is you understand what the tools do, you know where you want to get to but cannot fathom how to get there."

Bob - you're exactly right. I know what AE can do, it's just that I find all Adobe products since I started with Photoshop 5 to be so counterintuitive to use - at least compared to Vegas. I've alreeady made some progress "doodling" as you say and I certainly wouldn't get into it for anything that had to be done until I can learn how to use it. Moste of the tutorials I've looked at seem to be more of the "Gosh Gee Whiz" look what you can do - not how to do them. Thanks for the advice and I'll keep doodling.
ken c wrote on 5/17/2009, 8:59 AM
agree the VCP tuts, also "make it great" dvds and lynda tutorials are helpful.

I first started learning AE myself about 3 years ago, and only now am I just beginning to get comfortable with it, it's a real bear (like cinema4d) to learn.... Vegas took only watching a few instructional dvds and a couple of months ... AE on the other hand is incredibly complicated. glad I took the time though, as you can create stunning visual fx only in it.
Former user wrote on 5/17/2009, 9:38 AM
Yet another vote for Video Co-Pilot . Not only is Andrew Kraemer brilliant, he's actually quite funny in a weird sort of way.

VCP also sells a number of really good "preset" effects which come with tutorials on how to use them. It's stunning how much this guy achieves with, largely, the off-the-shelf version of AE. He uses products like "particulate" occasionally, but I found it he's really helpful.

I actually bought Adobe's After Effects intro book which helped a lot too. I learned the interface and basic functions going through their 15 tutorials...then I moved on to VCP which provided more in-depth focus. And since I'd already learned the interface and workflow, I could synthesize my own ideas, rather than just blinding going through step by step tutorials.
farss wrote on 5/17/2009, 1:23 PM
I guess once you get yout head around PS and using layers then AE starts to make sense. One thing in AE that rattled my brain was the concept of using a Solid layer as a starting point for so many things. Now that I've realised you've got to have a layer of pixels for something to work on it makes perfect sense.

To put AE into it's place in the bigger picture it is kind of the Vegas of the compositing world. Real Men don't use AE in much the same way as Real Men don't use Vegas. Real Men use Nuke or Fusion for comping just like Real Men use Avid to edit. Of course just as Avid sysetm require a clear path in your brain as to where you're going with an edit the same goes for Nuke or Fusion. Not only are they seriously expensive they're not easy to learn for most and because there's so much to do before anything happens they discourage the doodlers.

I guess why I'm saying this is because compositing is a more complex process than editing so the tools to do it with are harder to grasp and they come in increasing degrees of complexity. Editing video in any NLE is intuitive to varying degrees because the visual metaphore of a timeline is intuitive. You can "see" how it works. The way layers work in PS is not entirely intuitive and then AE adds the time element and complex operators to the process and what you see on the timeline does not provide a clue about how it all works.

Bob.