Tutorial Sites to Watch – After Effects

If you are like me, self education is one of the keys to your up and coming success.  Like a lot of people, I went to college… not a very prestigious college, but it gave me a taste of what I wanted to do in life.  When I was there, I learned mostly production value subjects, but very little motion graphics and design theory.  After I left college, I decided to pursue learning motion graphics, just for the sake of knowing it, if I ever needed it.  I started in After Effects.

Little did I know that it was going to be a side-along tool of my NLE, and eventually working almost exclusively within After Effects, with my editor becoming my secondary tool.  How did I do this?  With tutorial sites on the internet.  Places like Video Copilot and Motionworks, along with virtually hundreds of others have been the utmost important aspect of my staying on top of the game, and learning new tips and techniques everyday.

In these articles I will be producing every couple weeks, I will showcase some of the tutorial sites that you should be watching and have bookmarked if you haven’t already.  Whether you are learning After Effects, ZBrush, Premiere, Avid, Final Cut, Motion, or any of the other numerous applications out there to help you push your ability past what you ever thought possible.

Video Copilot

Andrew Kramer is pretty much the god of free After Effects tutorials.  Okay, god is a little much, but he makes some of the coolest stuff within only After Effects that you have ever seen.  Tutorials like the Demon Face, Futuristic HUD, or the Meteor Series, really show how versatile After Effects can be.  They also have tons of killer products, and a great array of presets like Sure Target and 3D Falloff.

Motionworks

John Dickinson works at Foxtel in Australia and is the mastermind behind the Making It Look Great training series, which has the sixth installment ready for release in about a month.  JD is a great tutorial maker with cutting edge techniques, he has done e-seminars for Adobe, and has tuts on all kinds of different effects.  A lot of his stuff is titles based but there are occasional walkthroughs on on plugins like Primatte Keyer or Zaxwerks Invigorator.

Graymachine

Harry Frank is an expressions master.  That, and he also makes some killer tutorials that are very heavily reliant on expressions.  He also really knows his stuff with Trapcode Particular and Form.  Coincidentally, he actually has training DVDs on all of these subjects.  He’s also always posting up free projects for Form, Particular and handy little presets every once in a while as well.

Maltaannon

Jerzy Drozda Jr. aka Maltaannon has been around for a while, and most people in the AE community know his name.  he has got tons of tutorials, and also creates some really useful, what he calls… CustomEffects (CE’s).  These plugin type of presets install using Adobe Air, and are really worth the few bucks that they cost.  A lot of the earlier ones are free such as CETimeShuffle or CEShapeExtruder… and can save you loads of time with certain effects.  A few of the newer ones like CELightWrap, which creates a snazzy little lightwrap on elements you specify, and CEScreenify that creates jumbotron screens, cost just under ten bucks, but that is super cheap for a plugin.  Maltaannon is definately a big hitter in the AE world.

Adobe Resources

Obviously since they are the creators of After Effects, they are going to have a ton of resources.  They have developer’s blogs, Adobe TV, and people like Dennis Radeke and John Nack that are right there in the nitty gritty of AE, and provide some great articles and videos.  Dennis runs the Genesis Project which has Adobe Beginner Classes, tons of video tutorials, and new reviews on different things that come out of Adobe, like features, applications and bug fixes.  There are tons of useful videos on Adobe TV, from e-seminars, to real seminars, to video created specifically for Adobe TV.  Here are a few other Adobe Resources that youn might find useful as well:

• http://www.adobe.com/support/aftereffects/
• http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/

Some Unknown Resources

Noise Junkies

Noise Junkies is hosted by Rafael Guerra, which got a start in the last month or so, and already has a good little arsenal of tutorials.  Even though some of the techniques are very basic, there are still a bunch of little techniques for the toolbox that you can put to use down the road.   They dabble in After Effects as well as Cinema 4D, and the C4D tutorials (in my opinion) are way better than the AE ones.  But remember, they are just starting out at Noise Junkies… so once, their techniques grow in AE like they have in C4D, it is gonna be a hot site to watch.

AE Portal

Rich Young runs aeportal.blogspot.com, which reposts news, videos, tutorials, articles and tons of other stuff pertaing to After Effects and the VFX/Mograph world.  He updates almost daily, and it is always a nice little stop during the day to see what Rich laid out for you.  From news on Adobe working on searchable dialog in video, to mini tutorial roundups for you to waste some time on, it is a great site to explore.  It also goes back almost 5 years, so that is a lot information to be taken in.

MaxAfter.com

I really like this site, because he makes stuff just as cool as Andrew Kramer.  He also uses a lot of 3ds Max in his work, also where he gets the name MAX and AFTER…   it took me months to realize the correlation… lordie.  Anways the guy that runs it is Shoaib Khan and VFX/motion graphics artist in London.   If you are interested in working Max and AE together into your workflow, this is a great site to check out, full of some really amazing looking effects.

Red Giant TV

RGTV is fairly new, and hasn’t gained a lot of steam yet, but hopefully this will help them out, as well as give you all a ton of tutorials to check out.  The RGTV show is generally hosted by Aharon Rabinowitz of All Bets Are Off Productions, but some of our favorite tutorial creators pop in here and there, such as Maltaannon, Eran Stern, Michele Yamazaki and some others.  The show only deals with Red Giant’s plugins specifically, but most of the time a lot of us have some of the plugins they talk about.

CGSwot.com

Last one I have on here, is Dave Scotland’s new site, CGSwot.com.  He doesn’t have very many tutorial right now, but the stuff he creates is A+.   He jumps around with the subject of his tuts as well… some he uses Particular and Horizon, a few the puppet tool with some 3D thrown in, and the laterst explores layer styles within After Effects.  He also has tutorials on 3ds Max and Photoshop as well, which is great to learn to integrate everything together.

So that’s it for this tut site roundup, something old, something new.  Now we just need something borrowed… hmmm.  How about checking out FXoffice.net?  They have a ton of free project files that you can use to make some sweet looking title plates for your videos!  Next time we will check out some 3D sites… so stay tuned, and remember if you arent following us on twitter yet, we are @VideoHive and I am @toe_fur.