'After Effects Apprentice' translated to video

Chris and Trish Meyer are taking the lessons in their book After Effects Apprentice and recording them as a video training series at Lynda.com. If they're like the book, the lessons will be project-based and methodical yet gentle.

'VFX and Compositing Studio Techniques' review + giveaway

After Effects CS5 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques was released in October and my review at AEtuts is just in time for Christmas returns.

Adam Everett Miller posted details on the book giveaway (just "Like" AEtuts on Facebook).

'Creating Motion Graphics' review + giveaway

Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects CS5 was released in June and my review at AEtuts is just in time (for Black Friday).

@aetuts (Adam Everett Miller) says "Retweet, I'm gonna pick somebody to send a copy of the book to."

Update: new version.

AE Studio Techniques for CS5 + scripts

After Effects CS5 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen is out.

Studio Techniques takes a different approach from most AE books, not only by giving you 'just the facts' but by adding a task-based focus on visual effects. It complements the approaches in Creating Motion Graphics and other books, and adds 'divide and conquer' methods and practical tips to solve specific problems in After Effects. It'll be interesting to see what's new in this edition.

Update: one thing new is references to new scripts, see a list of the authors and scripts mentioned at AE Scripts.

Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects CS5

Chris Meyer announced Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects, Fifth Edition for CS5 today on the AE-List. If your browser tab is too narrow you may have missed the chapter excerpts pointed out by Todd Kopriva, who broadcasts a hearty recommendation.

Trish and Chris Meyer are among the very earliest users and teachers of After Effects and have redesigned the book to reflect new features from both CS4 and CS5. This is the definitive book on After Effects and an essential reference for all but a few. It now includes sections on:

• Mastering animation through the use of keyframes, motion paths, and the Graph Editor
• Blending imagery using alpha channels, masks, mattes, modes, and stencils
• Building groups and hierarchies through parenting and nested compositions
• Extended coverage of type animation, paint tools and 3D space
• New CS5 features including Roto Brush, mocha v2 for AE, and the Digieffects Freeform
• Advanced subjects such as keying, motion tracking, mocha, expressions, integrating with 3D applications, and video issues
• Extensive coverage of recently added features such as Shape and Puppet tools, Per-character 3D text, Brainstorm, Cartoon effect, color management, and more
• The DVD also includes almost 200 pages of additional information, including lengthy Bonus Chapters on Expressions and Effects.

The 12 basic principles of animation for After Effects

AE Tuts Premium ($9 /month or less) is featuring an After Effects tutorial series by Bryan Clark on applying the Disney system of 12 Basic Principles of Animation. Here's a sample:

Wikipedia has a decent article on the 12 basic principles of animation, "a set of principles of animation introduced by the Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation." I'm just excited because I found a paperback version in a used bookstore for $4 this last weekend.

If you don't have John Lasseter's seminal 1987 SIGGRAPH paper based on The Illusion of Life, there's a decent scanned copy available: Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation.

Fuel Your Motionography finished a 3-part explanation in October with examples from recent works; see Principles of Animation for Motionographers – Part 3 of 3. Also, in the recent Lynda.com training series After Effects CS4 Beyond the Basics, Chad Perkins explores techniques for animation according to several of these principles.

Transforming the Magazine Experience with WIRED

Adobe TV is hosting the video below from Adobe's XD Inspire RIA magazine, Transforming the Magazine Experience with WIRED:

"Built on Adobe AIR and developed with Condé Nast, the tablet prototype we showed during TED... Adobe and WIRED magazine introduce a new digital magazine concept that provides an immersive, interactive content experience for readers and innovative possibilities for advertisers...

There's more at the blog Adobe Digital Publishing. Other demos can be found in the recent AEP post Video in magazines of the future + Apple's Tabula Rasa.



Update: see also iPad e-Books Have No Part in Adobe’s Story from jkOnTheRun.

Michael Pollan on 'Food Rules'

On Monday, Democracy Now hosted Michael Pollan on Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual,

'the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, discusses the link between healthcare and diet, the dangers of processed foods, the power of the meat industry lobby, the “nutritional-industrial complex,” the impact industrial agriculture has on global warming, and his sixty-four rules for eating. “The markets are full of what I call edible food-like substances that you have to avoid,” says Michael Pollan. “So a lot of the rules are to help you, you know, navigate that now very treacherous landscape of the American supermarket.” Today we air an excerpt of the Oscar-nominated documentary Food, Inc. and then spend the rest of the show with Michael Pollan.'

The interview starts near 9:30.

Visual Language for Designers

Vizworld noted a review by Jessica Palmer at Bioephemera of the book Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand by Connie Malamed.

See also Malamud's blog, an extension of the book, Understanding Graphics — Design For The Human Mind.

Video in magazines of the future + Apple's Tabula Rasa

With e-book readers and computer tablets coming to the fore, the publishing industry hopes for salvation. All Things Digital covered the backstory, especially Wired's effort, in November. Apparently, "Adobe is creating a publishing tool for the new format, as well as magazine-reader software that may come pre-installed on the devices or may require a download."

This of course goes beyond "book video" and what's now called the "Vook," both discussed here on AEP earlier this year. Here's a few examples of what's in development by Wired (loud audio), Sports Illustrated, and Berg with Mag+:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Update: Recovering Journalist takes an overview in Apple's Tabula Rasa.

What is a Vook?

Beet.TV posted an item on the vook, a digital book/video hybrid, a "Game-Changing" Platform:



Update: Laura Miller of Salon asks, Do readers really want video-book hybrids?

Update 2: Beet.TV adds Book Publishers, Authors Launching iPhone Apps along with real-time examples, visual screenshots, blog feeds and iPhone versions.

Books and their future

There's more going on than the Google's attempt to control all out-of-print books, Amazon.com's 1984, or poor graphics in Amazon's Kindle, but that's enough to keep us busy for now. Slate has a nice rundown on Amazon's remote deletion of e-books from Kindles in Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four and The New Yorker's long review A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book? ends pondering the free “Kindle for iPod” application. Apple's plans of course are unknown, though they've been in talks with book publishers.

Mediabistro's BayNewser has several items on books and the future, including Google Engineering Director Spells Out Vision for the Future of Digital Books, Green Apple Books Smacks Down the Kindle, and Civil Rights Leaders Heart Google Books Settlement. ReadWriteWeb has more on e-books and Google Books, as does CNET and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Also, the Internet Archive and others are trying to broaden efforts on access to information through The Open Content Alliance. Democracy Now interviewed the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle about digitization, the Google Book Search Settlement, and the future of books and libraries on April 17 in San Francisco.

E-books seem like a good idea, but not if they have weak graphics and can't be sold or read on any device the buyer chooses -- apart from any 1984-like book banning scenarios. San Francisco bookstore Green Apple looks at the downsides of the expensive Kindle in a series of 3 YouTube videos; here's one:

Update: When asked about After Effects books, Chris Meyer says,

"Whatever you do, DON'T get the Kindle version of our books. They're in black and white, the page layout has been auto-reflowed meaning illustrations and tips get separated from their corresponding text, plus I don't think you get the DVD-ROM of project and media files."

'Droidmaker' free & other curios

Via Adam Wilt is a free (for now) PDF version of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution, a history of early computer graphics and nonlinear editing. Droidmaker author Michael Rubin's presentations around the Bay Area upon the book's release were entertaining, and the book got the nod from Alvy Ray Smith, who with Ed Catmull co-founded Pixar.

Rubin has more on the same line, including early home movies of ILM from former ILMer and SFSU/MSP AE instructor Dave Berry (catch his life-affirming video Laugh if you can). Rubin also noted a web version of George Lucas: Maker of Films, a 1971 PBS piece with an interview of Lucas by film theorist Gene Youngblood, author of Expanded Cinema. There's additional background from source Binary Bonsai, who also noted the Raiders 125-page story conference transcript.



Youngblood's book itself is also available as a PDF download, if you're interested in expanded or synaesthetic cinema, an idea that includes visual music, experimental animation, and motion graphics. For more see the AEP post Visual music and motion graphics, which includes a 'making of' on Larry Cuba's computer graphics in the first Star Wars movie.

12 basic principles of animation

Wikipedia has a decent article on the 12 basic principles of animation, "a set of principles of animation introduced by the Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. "

If you don't have John Lasseter's seminal 1987 SIGGRAPH paper based on The Illusion of Life, there's a decent scanned copy available: Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation.

In the recent Lynda.com training series After Effects CS4 Beyond the Basics, Chad Perkins explores techniques for animation according to several of these principles.

Also, here's Adobe in San Francisco (the code from "Link" on Google Maps):


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A growing list of free tutorials from Focal Press

Focal Press has a growing list of free tutorials from their books on After Effects (and Photoshop).

George Bush's biography of Muhammad, + Henry Stubbe

Reading American history can take you back further into other contexts... Two curious old out-of-print biographies of the Prophet Muhammad popped up on Google Books and elsewhere on the Internet more recently.

The Life of Mohammed: Founder of the Religion of Islam, and of the Empire of the Saracens is by Rev. George Bush (1796-1859), an actual relative of the infamous presidential family. This copy was scanned from Harvard Library and printed by J. & J. Harper in 1833.

I'd seen this book mentioned when flipping through a book by Fuad Sha'ban at City Lights Bookstore and later seen an actual old copy in Black Oak Books. It's partially sympathetic to Islam as a step away from paganism but at the same time calls Muhammad an imposter, which apparently was an issue in Egypt a few years ago. The context of the period, according to American Palestine by Stanford professor Hilton Obenzinger, is the view of America as a New Israel, a promised land chosen to do God's work on Earth, along with a "Holy Land Mania" of tourism to Palestine where natives were seen much the same as the natives of North America. If you visit the Stanford University quad and see the mural on the outside of the church, you might see California as a Promised Land!

Another even older book on the same subject has also been made available, and it's amazingly accurate on a number of levels for a book from 1670 or so (for example, on Christian history).

An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism: With the Life of Mahomet and a Vindication of Him and His Religion from the Calumnies of the Christians is by Henry Stubbe (1632-1676), a royal physician, classics scholar, and expert on chocolate. The copy you can download from Google was scanned from the UC Berkeley collection, prepared by Mahmud Khan Shairani from a manuscript from the Disney Catalogue, and published by Luzac (London) in 1911. There's another copy scanned from an Indian source on Archive.org.

Until more recently much of what was commonly known about Stubbe and his advocacy of Unitarianism or "Mahometan Christianity" was from British historian Christopher Hill, best known for his work on the English Revolution and period groups like the Diggers and Levellers, and the Quakers, Shakers, Ranters, and Seekers. A cool view of the relations between England and Islamic states in this period can be found in Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (pictured left), when the views of Muslims were more nuanced than the later period of Rev. George Bush, the European Conquest, and colonialism.

Update: other similar free old books include Ivan Ilych And Hadji Murad by Leo Tolstoy and The Crescent And The Rose Islam And England During The Renaissance by Samuel C. Chew.

Free CS4 chapter of 'Creating Motion Graphics'

Chris and Trish Meyer posted a free bonus chapter of their book Creating Motion Graphics that outlines the differences between AE CS3 and CS4. They include many examples and tutorials in the PDF; the accompanying project file available is free but assumes you have the disc that came with CMG4.

Focal Press has a list of other free tutorials by the dynamic duo from all their books.

After Effects Apprentice video on CS4 interface

Chris & Trish Meyer have posted an introduction to the AE CS4 interface from the 2nd edition of After Effects Apprentice, a book designed for students and those who do not use AE full time like editors and web designers.

The DVD-ROM that comes with the new edition of the book includes an hour and a half of video tutorials that provide gentle introductions to major features inside After Effects, such as text and expressions.

AE CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques

Mark Christiansen says that "soon After Effects CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques will be on its way from the printer to warehouses and then out to the world." Apparently it's just in time for Christmas pre-orders on Amazon!

New stuff includes guidance from scripting gurus Dan Ebberts and Jeff Almasol (including light wrap and camera mapping), tracking in Mocha AE, and more.

Note: you can get a flavor of camera mapping but no script in a Peachpit excerpt from a previous version of the book.

Trish & Chris Meyer book excerpts

Todd Koprivia, the After Effects Help czar, helped get Focal Press to post excerpts from Trish & Chris Meyer's AE books; see Trish and Chris Meyer's books: excellence and excerpts. Look for the Focal Press sign-up alert for the release of the chapter on CS4.

Don't go nook-ya-ler, more posts on politics are coming -- I'm still working on the correct pronunciation of W.

Update: Todd has more book excerpts to share in Trish and Chris Meyer's books: excellence and excerpts (take 2).