Wednesday
May042005
Get Yours
Wednesday, May 4, 2005 at 9:21PM 
It’s out. Get it. Adobe After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen.
The description on Amazon is stupid (as of this writing anyway — here’s a better one). There’s nothing in this book about animating type, and it’s not for people trying to learn After Effects. It’s a hardcore film compositing book in the tradition of Brinkman’s and Wright’s, but unlike those it focusses specifically on real world how-tos, with numerous examples and color plates. For film professionals (or those aspiring/pretending to be), the chapter on light and color by eLin co-creator Brendan Bolles is worth the price on its own. And there's even a fun little chapter at the end by me, which you can bleach clean and use as a handy note-taking area.
Reader Comments (6)
Big Stu,
I'm afraid to say that part of the problem of it being misinterpreted as being something other than a film compositing book (which I assume focuses on AE) is the name!
When hunting for compositing books I wouldn't pick it up if I saw it on the shelf :( :(
Agreed.
just ordered it. I can't wait to go through it.
Ordered the book Thursday morning from Amazon and had it in my hands Friday.
Excellent book, very much in the tradition of Wright with general advice that can be applied to any package, but with practical examples of After Effects work. Your chapter rocked Stu.
Joe
I just wish somw of the footage explained in the chapters were also located on the CD. Like the baseball shot to be tracked, I would really like to follow along. Other than that and excellent book!
I am a book taught Media Artist, and have been borrowing /buying books & tapes related to After Effects and Photoshop (an easier way in for me to understand image manipulation) for the past 4 years. Yeah, poor man's college. But after reading this book, I felt like I graduated! $30-ish Diploma from Amazon!
Studio Techniques is much easier to follow than Focal's scientific Digital Compositing, and offers better AE solutions than Digital Compositing in Depth. All I ever wanted to do was composite within AE. Not make 3-D monsters or generate particles or animate flyby fonts. Nope. Just mix and layer moving images like you can do in Photoshop. That's all this book deals with, thankfully. Oh, there's so much to cover that I have never read elsewhere. I'm grateful for Creating Motion Graphics, and AE 5.5 Magic, yet the other adobe books have tutorials I was not excited by. It's almost smarter to NOT have tutorials, as that creates a value judgement on the user. (The early Adobe books that animated a drawn cat on a scooter. Why bother living?)
That said, for on-set shooting for composites, look at DC-in depth. For compositing and making it look right, this is the end all be all. Seriously. I have vowed to not purchase another After Effects or Photoshop book because Studio Techniques answered all the my questions. The Wright book is good, read it if you can find it, but Studio Tech is required reading.
FWIW: Try and find all the Christiansen DV magazine articles online. He has a good one about Mr. Stu shooting a Rolex Commmercial and approaching on-set video as a "camera negative," not the final shot.
All the best,
Anthony Torres
Orlando FL