advice - AE online courses.
 

Yo, dudes. First off I just wanna say thanks for scoping this post out. It's very convenient to be able to just run this kind of stuff by you guys. I feel guilty doing this, by the way. I just recently added AE to my arsenal... I've pretty much got FCP mastered, so I think. And now... I'm moving into the compositing world. Excellent. Another program to learn.

Anyway, I wanna hasten the learning process, and I've been tossing around the idea of enrolling in some online classes for AE. I've looked into Lynda and fxphd, and they seem all right. I wanna get into a really extensive program. I'm willing to throw out some cash for it. I'd like to hear some of your experiences with online classes if you've had any, or know of "big name ones". I'm having trouble searching them out.

Once again, thanks for any insight you can offer on this topic. I'm looking forward to hearing. Thanks so much, and take care.

Stay gold, Pony Boy. Stay gold...

Douglas,

When I purchased CS4 Production Premium it included the choice of a free gift...one of those being Lynda.com training for 31 days. Here's my 2 cents there....

At the time (December 2008) there were three tutorial series for AE CS4. I did all three for a total of about 14 hours or so of training. It was a good start, covered many of the basics and a few key details and Chad Perkins (the trainer for the AE Essentials part) had a clear teaching persona. If you have that option it's not a bad idea by any means to start here. I have also seen some new AE tutorials go up in recent months for specific subjects.

Having said that there are many other options....

My current favorite right now is the book Creating Motion Graphics by Trish Meyer. It includes a DVD with working projects and the book is very in depth and well explained. Much more meat inside it than I found with the Lynda tuts. Best 50 bucks I've spent in a long time!

Don't count out several other options like videocopilot.net, maltannon and other online AE tutorials as they all help to show AE working with various projects and concepts. I don't know if I would consider these online sources as true 'training' but certainly they are another good option.

Hope that helps,
James Hooey

I heartily endorse James recommendations, Chris & Trish Meyers' "Creating Motion Graphics" series are not only great learning tools but are great to reference later on. And all the web sites he mentions have good project based tutorials as well.

I'd add the "Total Training" folks. I haven't used there stuff for awhile now, but Brian Maffitt was a great and very knowledgeable trainer, (better than Perkins at Lynda.com) and hopefully their new trainers are as good.

Also Mark Christiansen has some books and an older training video on VTC. He's very focused on compositing and keying functions; abit technical but very handy to know.

Thank you 4 the useful info guys;what about this volume n.2?

Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects: Volume 2: su eBay.it, Nonfiction Books, Books