After Effects Resources
Since there's no advacned AE class at CSM, I've gathered a collection of some of the best free (or nearly free) resources for tutorials online. The sites below probably represent a 1000 hours or more of AE tutorials - and can teach you far more than I could in in any case! If you come across any more good sites that aren't listed here, send me a link!
- Adobe TV After Effects Channel
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Probably the single biggest resource for online tutorials - Adobe aggregates video tutorials from all over the web here, all of which are free. You'll find tutorials from many of the sites linked below here.
- Video Copilot
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Video Copilot is a company that makes a variety of effects plug-ins for AE, but they also have a great series of free AE tutorials (99 currently).
- Maltaanon.com
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Roughly 60 free AE tutorials covering some unique and advanced topics. Several of them highlight some of the great 3rd-party plugins available, especially the trapcode products.
- Lynda.com
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Lynda.com is a great resource for learning a wide variety of graphics software. While some of their content is free the majority is paid - but at $25/month it's probably the bargain of the century in terms of what they give you. They currently have over 20 hours of CS4-specific AE tutorials, and over 100 hours covering earlier versions with techniques that work in CS4 as well.
- Creative Cow
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Creative COW ('Communities of the World') is a huge collection of online forums for all types of graphics software. They have an active AE community as well as several hundred AE tutorials.
- Pro Video Coalition - CMG Keyframes
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This is a blog by Chris and Trish Meyers, authors of the Creating Motion Graphics with AE series of books. Their blog has a variety of tutorials and tips for getting the most out of AE.
- Layers Magazine
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Layers is a print magazine about Adobe products - they have a great collection of online AE tutorials, many of which highlight ways to use other Adobe products in conjunction with AE.
- All Bets Are Off
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A couple hundred free tutorials by Aharon Rabinowitz, many of which cover interesting 3rd-party plugins for AE.
