Adobe After Effects CS5: Learn by Video

Adobe After Effects CS5: Learn by Video by Angie Taylor and Todd Kopriva is shipping. It's 14+ hours of training on a DVD, plus a 120-page book from Video2brain. Here's what Todd, now in tech support, says about this package:

"I made sure that every single question that we commonly get asked is covered... and hopefully prevented. That's the one way that I'm pretty sure that this series differs from all other resources for learning After Effects. As a separate project, I also recorded this very brief set of FAQ videos. These [free] videos are not on the DVD; longer and more detailed versions of some of the issues are, though.

It's a foundation. This training series is designed to take someone from beginner level to intermediate level. The goal was to give an introduction that would give a person the fundamentals, concepts, and terminology with which to understand all of the other resources out there. We covered motion graphics and visual effects and compositing in roughly equal shares, with Angie doing more with motion graphics, and really showing the depth and fun of shapes, text, and 3D.

Seriously, my focus was on making sure that someone watching these lessons would know all of the fundamental concepts, terms, and controls so that they could then go nuts watching tutorials, playing on their own, or learning however they wanted. I was going to make sure that their house was built on rock, not sand. Angie had a similar focus but, because we are such different people, she did more about actually creating and building. I think that this complementary set of lessons works very well together. [emphasis added + slight edits]"

Update: BTW, Angie has another book out too, Design Essentials for the Motion Media Artist: A Practical Guide to Principles & Techniques, as well as an in-depth design reading list. I missed these using an old link!