Adobe After Effects Classroom in a Book 2024 Release

It's great for speed running end of semester assignment (I procrastinated and it came in clutch). Very easy to follow and all the lessons are available when you register the book with everything you need.

Helpful for creating educational materials

It answered all the questions I was looking for !Very detailed explanation!

I create videos. They mostly fall into the class of Poetic Documentaries (no story; just pretty pictures). I usually edit my videos in Adobe Premiere Pro, but every once in a while, I encounter a problem, or want to create an effect, that Premiere can’t handle, but that I can deal with in Adobe After Effects.The book provides a series of instructional tutorials on the use of After Effects. You download lesson files and work on them on your computer with After Effects. (You will have to subscribe to After Effects from Adobe separately.) The book will lead you through these tutorials step by step. One of the conveniences is that you can buy the book and then launch a copy of it from the publisher’s web site. You can then switch back and forth between text and program without juggling a book. (If your screen is big enough, at least in Windows, you can keep them both open on your desktop.) There are videos on-line that you can follow rather than reading the text, which is great if you learn better that way. There are occasional tips that don’t appear in the book either.I’ve looked at several books aimed at instructing the reader in the fundamentals of After Effects, and so far this is the best one. It’s no easy job to labor through the lessons. I’ve done it, but don’t use After Effects enough to call myself skilled. I've learned what it can do and the fundamentals, and often, when I need it for something, I’ll first review a video, without actually doing the exercise.After Effects has a lot of capability and this book doesn’t reveal all of them. For example, I once needed to stabilize a video where everything in the frame was bouncing around in a breeze, except for a tree trunk in a corner. Premiere's Warp Stabilizer couldn't handle it so I switched to After Effects and stabilized the shot. The instructions in the book on the use of After Effects for stabilization were enough for me to realize that I could focus on just the tree trunk.I should note that there haven’t been many changes between the 2023 and the 2024 version of After Effects. The book has updated a few chapters with new videos but you may not want to buy this edition if you have the prior one.One thing that I would have liked to have seen included was the use of green screens. There is a reference in the book to the existence of color keying but nothing further. The program has just too many capabilities to fit into a single book. However, to learn the most useful features and provide the groundwork for examination of some of the subtleties, I think this is the best book around.

Well written and up to date with the latest version of AE.