After Effects Most Wanted

So you've a copy of After Effects and an idea of what this professional motion graphics and effects tool can do...but what can you really do with After Effects? How far can you push it? What are the best effects that you can create? What are the essential skills and techniques that you need to really make your creations stand out? After Effects Most Wanted answers these questions in a refreshing and practical way. Looking at a wide variety of projects the original artists tell you why, and exactly how they created their masterpieces.

The authors, all professionals who use After Effects to make a living, share with you the secrets of their successes and extend beyond that to give you the reasons why they did things the way that they did.

More so than that, the accompanying CD has their creations available at your fingertips and the simple, step-by-step instructions in the book show you how they created these pieces.

The projects covered are diverse, from a television commercial for McDonald's and Coca-Cola by Peter Reynolds, to a thought provoking work by renowned and controversial artist Simon Tsyko, a work featured by Adobe in their motion gallery.

Other authors include: Joost Korngold of Renascent and Chris James Hewitt, whose Relokation Ne is the a featured work on the BD4D (By Designers For Designers) web site, Christian Darkin, a digital video journalist and author, and Mark Towse, who offers two pieces, one for TV, one for the cinema.

Without long, redundant discussions of tools and application packages, After Effects Most Wanted is a book that delivers the techniques, skills, and effects that will let you bring your creations to life..

"Thanks to After Effects, a good small post-production house can do everything as well as the top Hollywood studio – if you have the relevant skills! There is no longer a technology barrier, working in DV. This means that we are going for absolute top level quality, and let's face it – if it looks good enough, the sky's the limit!" Mark Towse

What we cover in this book:

Advanced layering techniques
Compositing 3D renders into real video footage
Syncing video to music
Amazing transitions and morphing
Work for film, television, and the Web
Some of the top third-party plug-ins available

This book leaps straight into the production of high-level effects and as such you will need at least a basic knowledge of what After Effects can do and how its interface works. The effects in this book have been created with versions of After Effects ranging from 4.1 to 5.5, to recreate them exactly you will need at least version 5.0, but where possible our authors have offered advice of how to achieve similar things in earlier versions.

As with all books from friends of ED – our support is fast, friendly and free.

Even if our dedicated support team are unable to solve your problem immediately, your queries will be passed onto the people who put the book together, the editors and authors, to solve. All foED authors help with the support on their books, and will either directly mail people with answers, or (more usually) send their response to an editor to pass on.