After Effects and Premiere Pro
 

I'm a little confused here. I have seen tourials online for After Effects and in some of those tourials you can do the same thing in Premiere. My question is if I will be doing little special effects are there any other benitfits to getting After Effects. Such as rendering issues, control over the image, output abilities. Thanks

It really depends on what you want to do. Premiere does allow you to do some effects and basic color correction, similar to After Effects -- but AE does allow for a much greater range of opportunities and freedom.

AE really is like Photoshop for video -- it even has transfer modes and vector masks and such. It's not just "special effects" in the typical sense of the word -- you can get *a lot* of control over the image. 3D layers and parenting alone are incredible tools (there's a great tutorial on the web showing you how to create a "fly-through" through space station-esque corridors). Once you get the hang of it, you'll even start noticing when you see AE in use in TV and film. The industry is moving more towards Shake, it seems, but AE is still an increcibly powerful tool, even in Standard Edition.

But it may not be what you need -- like I said, it really depends on what you want to do.

AE Tutorial
 

John,

Are there any good tutorials to get you started on the web that you know of? Or even videos (MPEG1/VHS) that you can download / buy??

I've used AE a little bit and from what I understand, it's all about Key framing, which gives you the incredible control...

Cheers,
Jack

Some links to tutorial would be helpful. I learned my best stuff in Premiere from online tutorials. Thanks for the help.

Tip from the top though, don't try George Poleyov's flowing title tutorial until you fully understand the basics of AE and some of the more advanced features. I found the best tutorial to start on was the 3d fly though; that gets you into AE's limited 3D capabilities and gets you used to camera movement and keyframing.

Once you get good head on over to http://www.ayatoweb.com. These tutorials are awesome if you like to learn by thinking. Ayato, the genius behind them, tells you what effects he used and what values he keyframed, but doesn't go much further. He does, however, give you a quicktime of what your project should be doing at the end of each step; this means you have to see what changing the values does and either try to match what's going on in the quicktime or head off on your own tangent, both of which are equally rewarding.

On the original question, After Effects is used in hundreds of commercials and lower budget films. At heart it's a compositing tool for combining layers of video. But it's developed so that now it can be used for titles, pure motion graphics, colour correcting and even flash design. If you want to see the cutting edge of Ae usage then check out some of the stuff at http://www.mk12.com. Most of their stuff is done with AE and the 3D's done with maya. But these guys really push AE's features as far as they will go.

Kieran

Also, there is aefreemart.com, AEPortal has links to all types of tutorials, Chris and Trish Meyer have three great books on using After Effects, with some excerpts on their website, cybmotion.com (the company is actually CyberMotion, but someone else had cybermotion.com, I guess).

I came across another list of links to tutorials the other day, but can't find it again. If it turns up, I'll post that link as well.