Getting started: beginning After Effects

The beauty of Adobe After Effects is that it's approachable for simple tasks and at the same time has a feature set capable of producing complex film quality effects. In the olden days we had to walk miles through snow to pay for After Effects tutorials, if there were any, but now there's tons of worthy free stuff. The biggest gotcha with this material for beginners might be the new previewing features expected in the 2015 version of After Effects CC.

General sage advice is to start at the beginning, but knowing Photoshop and Premiere or Final Cut gives you a big head start. And remembering to "divide & conquer," that is subdividing tasks into doable chunks, will keep progress moving.

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Read the article at Pro Video Coalition, Start At The Beginning In After Effects.

Tutorials taking you beyond the basics

Todd Kopriva has a hyper-view of 2 recent tutorials by Andrew Devis mentioned in Using audio to control AE: 2 approaches in his post tutorials on using linear expression method, null control layers, and expression controls:

"... the real strength of these tutorials isn’t in the audio part of that instruction; it’s in the linking part.

Andrew shows very clearly and methodically how to use expressions (specifically the linear expression method), the expression pick whip, null object layers, expression control effects… all of which are immensely powerful and crucial features. Unfortunately, these same features are usually very intimidating for new users.

In other words, I think that Andrew may be selling himself short by saying that these are tutorials about something as easy to do as converting audio to keyframes. In fact, they are great resources for teaching some of the most important and universally useful features to help someone to move from the basics into doing seriously complex and advanced work in After Effects."

Read the rest, with the proper links, at After Effects region of interest.

Getting started with After Effects II

This post was updated in May 2015 and moved to PVC as Start at the beginning in After Effects.

Start at the beginning in After Effects

Start at the beginning in After Effects

Start at the beginning in After Effects

Start at the beginning in After Effects