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Old 02-06-2011, 10:50 AM   #104
feldon34
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Join Date: Dec 2000

Location: Rock Hill, SC
Posts: 10,937
You can download it from Adobe and play with it for 30 days.

I would suggest watching some of the tutorials at VideoCopilot.net and see what you think. The 10 part Basic Training is absolutely the way to go to initially learn it, but it's a bit boring as just something to watch, so I'd watch the bigger tutorials and see if the program looks like something you might fall in love with first. It is really astounding how much information is available for free at his website, and then the plugins, clip audio, clip explosions, etc. they offer are top-notch. He has explosions, dust clouds, puffs of smoke, blood splatter all shot in front of green screen and fully keyed so you can use it for anything.

You might be surprised to know that After Effects has a bit of scripting built into it allowing you to not only add random effects to any layer, but scale that effect or tie that effect to the effect of another layer.

The tutorial that blew my mind was adding a moving object to a shaky camera shot and it looks great. First, he stabilized the video, then he cut and paste the tracking data out of the video stabilization into a "tracking object". Now, the video was shaky again, but he had an object that moves and rotates to match the footage, giving you a key point you can then tie anything to.

After Effects turns tilting and panning a camera from the ground up to a mound of dirt and adding a castle to it into a 10 minute task.
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