Book Image

Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects

By : Vishu Aggarwal
Book Image

Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects

By: Vishu Aggarwal

Overview of this book

Visual effects and motion graphics are everywhere, shaping the film, TV, games, websites, and application landscape. Navigating a field this complex and ever-expanding demands more than mere familiarity with tools; you need to stand out to get ahead. Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects is the definitive guide that not only equips you with the essential skills to distinguish yourself, but also takes you through real projects that you can add to your portfolio. Guided by a hands-on learning approach, you'll master the UI, workflow, and diverse projects such as text animation, shape layers, and rotoscoping. With this newfound knowledge, you’ll take your graphic design and post-production skills to the next level using chroma keying, particle simulations, and 2D and 3D tracking. You’ll progress faster than someone taking a formal course in Adobe After Effects! And it’s not all about creating; you’ll import graphics from Illustrator and Photoshop and apply post-production effects to give them a new life. Finally, you’ll discover how seamlessly you can export and manage your projects, ensuring end-to-end coverage of all you need. By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of Adobe After Effects, equipped with the skills and practice you need to propel your career in graphic design.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Working with Motion Graphics
8
Part 2: Post-Production and Visual Effects
13
Part 3: 2D and 3D Tracking, and Rendering

Getting to Know the User Interface and Workflow

This chapter is an overview of the Adobe After Effects user interface. Here, you will learn about the workspace as well as the basic operations performed in the user interface.

You will also learn how to import media files, image sequences, video files, and other formats. This chapter describes how to follow best practices when importing media files.

Furthermore, you will learn how to create keyframes in the timeline and set up preferences to suit your needs. Along with the basic operations of adjusting and creating a composition in After Effects, further details about composition creation will be elucidated.

The main topics we’ll cover in this chapter are as follows:

  • Customizing the user interface
  • Importing media files
  • Creating compositions and keyframes
  • Rendering compositions using the render queue
  • Optimizing After Effects’ performance