From After Effects to Flash: Poetry in Motion Graphics

As a Flash 8 designer, you have discovered the power of the video tools in the application. The new filters and effects and ActionScript classes allow you to create a variety of stunning visual effects in Flash. What you probably havent discovered is how easy it is empower your video hundreds of times more by combining the many effects and tools in After Effects 7 Professional with Flash!

This book, the first to explore the potential power and creativity boost that can be unleashed when After Effects and Flash are used together, is designed to get you up to speed with working in these two applications while hitting you with some creative innovation. You will discover how effectively you can use After Effects to create video and animation effects that were either extremely difficult or impossible to achieve in Flash.

By the end of this book, you will have created a variety of projects ranging from text effects, masks, and alpha channel video to 3D effects and audio visualization. All are designed to show you the potential available to you with these two powerhouse applications, and, more importantly, to expand the arsenal of creative motion graphics tools at your disposal.

Summary of contents: Chapter 1: From Concept to Final Product in After Effects Chapter 2: From Final Product to Upload in Flash Professional 8 Chapter 3: Motion Graphics and the Preset Text Effects Chapter 4: Creating Alpha Channel Video for Flash Chapter 5: Creating Text Animations for Flash Chapter 6: Creating Special Effects Chapter 7: Playing with Text Chapter 8: Meet the Parents Chapter 9: The Video Behind the Mask Chapter 10: Track Mattes Are Your Friend Chapter 11: Adding a Third Dimension Chapter 12: Audio, the Red-Headed Kid in a Family of Blondes

User review
pass on this title
Numerous mistakes; instructions are very difficult to follow because nearly all of them are not illustrated. A very frustrating experience. Normal projects that should have taken 20 minutes to complete toke nearly two hours try to figure out what the author meant. Not up to FriendsofEd's standards but then again a few of their more recent titles are really showing rush work.

User review
Poetry Doesn't Have to Rhyme, But It's Easier to Remember if it Does.
Another great book for the beginner. Not so great for the experienced. Those familiar with Flash and just getting started with After Effects will enjoy this tour of possibilty. You CAN use these two powerful tools together to get more done in a better way for the medium you choose. The message of the book is clearly: 'Use the Right Tool for the Job'. There's a lot you can do with Flash that's just easier with After Effects and vice versa. Why make life difficult for yourself? Buy this book. Lighten your load. (Or borrow it from a library. Or just read it at the store.)

When is it best to use After Effects or Flash? And why? Don't expect this book to answer those questions for you. Oftentimes, choosing the right tool depends on your situation. And the examples given in the book focus mostly on neat, yet basic, effects exported from After Effects and delivered through Flash. All good starting points for the motion graphic artist, but not necessarily finished to a fine,,. erm, point. (As media converges, so do my metaphors.)

The authors walk us through the basic steps of working in After Effects. But, an After Effects book this is not. It simply points the way. And the way is convergence. (See?) After reading this book I feel the need to read a lot more books. Or get an AE expert and Flash guru in the same room and interrogate them aggressively.

Many techniques are touched upon, but not much is dissected in a truly deep manner. There are three chapters on text effects, much about particle effects, masks are explained as are track mattes. Even a little about 3D, and some Illustrator tips, too. Also, a chapter on audio for good measure. When you bite off that much, you really have to chew for a long time.

All that being said, it is a well-written and useful book for those of us just starting out with this stuff. And the can-do, fun tone of the authors is always appreciated.

User review
Bring out the big gun, After Effects and Flash
From After Effects to Flash Poetry in Motion Graphics
By Tom Green and Tiago Dias
Publisher: Friends of Ed
Copyright 2006
ISBN:-130pkb:978-1-59059-748-4

Sometimes video can be seen as a very difficult area of Flash. This book gives you the courage to go forward. The author's refer to video as uncharted or `Dragon Country` They cite an artic map of the 1500's that has wording on it stating `Here be dragons`

The book tells you how Flash and After Effects play well together and how to avoid dragons. After Effects functionality really beefs up what can be accomplished with Flash.

Tom Green describes the creative process as learning the fundamentals and then `driving a truck through it` He talks about how the lines are blurred between what is a video and what is an animation.

The authors teach through causing you to ask, `How did they do that?` They give you a completed project and you reverse engineer it and answer for yourself how it was done.

This book helps you decide when to encode the FLV in After Effects and when it is better to use the Flash FLV encoder.

Of course the fundamental maxim of DV is `data rate controls quality.` Other maxims are `Bandwidth controls the user experience` and `always keep an eye on the pipe.` The Flash developer must have a solid bandwidth strategy in place for the user, the sever and the video.

Tom Green shows you how simple it is to make a custom video player with pause/play rewind, scrubber and on/off buttons. The simple steps are: CONNECT, STREAM, and PLAY.

The book shows you how to create a rich media ad with Illustrator content. Then it moves the file to After Effects for the Raining Characters, Drop Bounce and Boomerang, Wiggle and Chaotic preset effects. Then it brings the files into Flash and makes them FLV's. Then they show you how to use a glow effect to turn on a light bulb.

Destructive cue points that are hard wired into Flash (not removable) and non-destructive cue points (removeable) which are done with code are discussed. Discussion of playing multiple videos in a Flash movie by using multiple net streams is mentioned.

Practical tips are given such as: how to trim down the dimensions of an After Effects file and bring it into Flash to avoid slowing down the video.

Sine wave animation is done in After Effects without complex coding. Using a ramp filter to make gradients, blinking and melting text, and a strobe light effect is described. Use of plugins for After Effects by Cycore demonstrate how to shatter everything and blow it up. 3d - the Holy Grail of Flash and how to get a creative jolt with After Effects is previewed.

This book is helpful whether you are thinking of learning After Effects or would just like to know how to work with an After Effect expert when doing Flash movies.


User review
Should be a Foundation title
By now, everyone knows the great enhancements to working with video that Flash 8 brought with it. As someone who works closely with a motion animator in After Effects, I figured it'd be a great idea to check this book out and see what others are doing with it. I have to admit, I was sorely disappointed with what this book had to offer. To its credit, the book never did state that it was going to show me any groundbreaking After Effects stuff and how to leverage it in Flash to create a crazy, dynamic, animation driven website. However, when I think of the stuff that has been done with AE and Flash over the past year or two, I don't really consider the awesomeness of the text animation and lens flares (Chapter 5) and exploding Flash text (Chapter 7).

There is much more to working with After Effects and Flash than things like this which were possible to do 5 years ago. I look at sites created by companies such as Big Spaceship and North Kingdom and always wonder, how did they do that. I know that they used video/After Effects for some of this stuff but I'm not quite sure how to wrap my head around the process of doing it since I'm not extremely familiar with AE and how to compress everything properly to bring into Flash for ease of use.

I'd like to see even something as simple as a particle system effect from AE used in a Flash button, which hundreds of sites are doing these days, or a particle system on a preloader (which always puzzles me since you have to keep the size of the preloader really small so that you don't have to make a preloader for a preloader), but instead we get fed with some drivel about preset text effects in AE (Chapter 3) and masking videos (Chapter 9). That now makes a total of 3 chapters that are talking about text. I'm not sure about you, but I don't spend a plethora of hours on each project trying to figure out how I want the text to animate in on an intro animation (one reason being that I very rarely ever create intro animations unless a client just flat out insists on having one, but still,,.).

This title would have been better served being labeled a Foundation title which friends of ED usually dishes out to introductory level books. It doesn't have the pizzazz that I was hoping from a title this misleading and I would not recommend this book unless you are absolutely just starting out using video in Flash 8 and After Effects (although, if you're a Flash guy, I'd suggest their other video title, Foundation Flash 8 Video, which could be the reason why this book didn't get the Foundation stamp in the first place).