by Mark Christiansen
ISBN AND TITLE = 978-0-321-83459-1
Mark Christiansen’s, After Effects and Visual Compositing Studio Techniques, takes you behind the scenes and under the hood of the latest super revved up version of Adobe After Effects.
The author begins by letting readers know that this is not a book for beginners. There are no step- by- step tutorials to be found here. Instead, Mr. Christiansen has written the book with the thought in mind of helping After Effects users become better visual effects artists. He accomplishes this by telling us pro ways to streamline our workflow, including what tools work best in different scenarios and gives us alternative solutions.
The book covers rotoscoping, motion tracking with the new 3D camera tracker and Mocha AE, color correcting and image optimization, color grading with Speedgrade-, ways to optimize projects and stay organized beyond pre-comping, pre-rendering and nesting layers, creating expressions – which includes a bonus list of additional online recourses, the new Ray-traced 3D Renderer, how to create depth maps, fog, explosions and special lighting effects and more, all while taking advantage of the new Global Performance and Persistent Disk Cache.
Improvements and additions in CS6 are explained thoroughly. All kinds of good tips and what the author calls, “gotchas” for sticky situations are pinpointed and brought to light.
Included with the book is a DVD containing Third party demo plug-ins including Red Giant’s Trapcode Suite, Silhouette and Revisions, an Examples folder with all the Chapter files, and a handy Java Script debriefing pdf within a PDF folder chalked full of more resources.
If you are already an After Effects user and want to learn more about the inner workings of After Effects and why a pro would opt for one or a combination of tools over another, than this book will be an asset to you as a visual effects artist.
Reviewed by Leslie Pierce
Austin Adobe Users Group
