Flash + After Effects

Flash Designers: push Flash to the next level with After Effects' robust toolset.
* Add motion graphics and visual effects to your Flash projects
* Fuse 3D depth into 2D animations
* Prepare Flash animations for broadcast
* Save development time in executing animations

Combine these two powerhouse applications to expand your multimedia horizons. Flash + After Effects gives the experienced Flash designer a working understanding of the After Effects toolset with professional techniques that raise the design bar for Web, broadcast, or CD/DVD delivery. The companion DVD contains project media that permit you to practice essential After Effects skills that include:
* Working with video and the AE timeline
* Using alpha channels for keying and enhancing interactivity
* Putting vector animation to work with Text and Shape Layers, and animation presets
* Creating 3D backgrounds with cameras and lights
* Animating with Behaviors, Parenting, Expressions and the Puppet Tool
You also get a video primer, render and file optimization techniques, and publishing and streaming guidelines.



Combine two powerhouse applications to:
* Add motion graphics and visual effects
* Fuse 3D depth into 2D animations
* Prepare Flash animations for broadcast
* Save development time

User review
Flash + After Effects
Eh, it's okay. It's definitely elementary. If you have any prior knowledge of Flash or After Effects, you can probably skip this.

User review
Flash + After Effects Offers Good Hands-On Tutorials
I recently enjoyed working through the exercises in Chris Jackson's book Flash + AfterEffects and I learned a lot about After Effects. I'm a beginner in After Effects and somewhere between a beginner and intermediate in Flash so I learned more about After Effects than Flash. Someone with less experience in Flash than me would probably learn more about it than I did. However, the book does assume `a working knowledge of the Flash workspace and an understanding of animation concepts and basic ActionScript.` To give a better idea of my After Effects background: I had previously worked through most of the Adobe After Effects CS4 Classroom in a Book exercises and had viewed and practiced numerous AE tutorials on lynda.com and had very limited experience using AE on real projects. I think it would be helpful to have some basic After Effects experience before coming to this book. The book's back cover indicates a target user level of `intermediate to advanced Flash designers.`

The book occupies an interesting niche in that it educates the reader on a workflow involving both products. Most books focus on only a single product and you're left to figure out your own workflow for real projects. This book shows how Adobe's two Creative Suite applications can be used very effectively together. The book will be useful for designers that are targeting either the internet or broadcast/DVD video. One might question why it would be necessary or useful to use After Effects together with Flash when Flash has the ability to do so many of effects on its own. Author Chris Jackson points out `,,. After Effects takes their project[s] to the next level in 2D animation. It provides Flash animators with an assortment of visual effects that are rather difficult or next to impossible to achieve in Flash.` I agree. After Effects offers the animator a wealth of sophisticated animation tools and presets that are not available within Flash. And, of course, AE is a natural for output to broadcast video or DVD but Flash also has things to offer to the AE specialist.

Of course, outputting to the web carries a different set of considerations than outputting to video -which the book does address. For example, when outputting to video, one needs to consider the action-safe and title-safe regions but those aren't relevant for video on the web. File size for video is not usually much of a problem but for the internet it's crucial. The book's examples address the relevant issues thoughtfully and offer approaches that leverage each program's strengths to end up with final products that are appropriate for their target platforms.

One great example of the ability of After Effects to do things that would be extremely time-consuming in Flash is in Chapter 5: Type in Motion. The `Download Text` example in that chapter shows the use of the After Effects text scale properties to very quickly animate the appearance of text onto the screen in a variety of ways. By adjusting just a few parameters in the text's Animators and Range Selectors a set of quite different and interesting effects can be accomplished with very little effort. To accomplish the same things in Flash would require a great deal of time spent animating individual text characters. And, when done, changing to a different sort of effect would probably require a good deal more effort. In AE, very different effects can be had by just tweaking a few parameters.

Flash + After Effects, like Adobe's Classroom in a Book series, comes with a DVD that includes source footage and other assets to use while you follow along with the exercises. Like the CiaB books, this is a book that is designed as a workbook. Just reading the text won't be helpful. You need work through the exercises to get anything out of the book. As such, it's an excellent way to learn. And, if you follow the author's recommendation to experiment with the examples, you'll really extend and solidify your understanding.

In general, I found the text to be well-written and well thought out. For the most part, the tutorials were easy to follow and included a variety of topics designed to increase the reader's repertoire while exposing the reader to as many of the two programs' features as possible.

I liked this book a lot and, as I mentioned earlier, learned a lot from its fun and interesting tutorials. However, I did encounter some problems due to the fact that the book was written for CS3 while I was running CS4. Most of the time I was able to figure out the differences and work around the problems. But incompatibilities or differences did arise repeatedly which made the going a little slower and, at times, somewhat confusing. I hope that Focal Press will release a version of the book updated for CS4.


User review
SAVE TIME and MONEY BUY THIS BOOK!!!
Hi there, the reason I am giving this book 5 stars is because the content in the book about production rendering movies to DVD and not making preproduction mistakes that would cost you dearly are discussed in this book, like Production for TV and using NTSC safe colors, and using Flash more efficiently reducing file sizes when making content, plus much more like using After Effects for creating Flash files is just a great help, and what I really appreciated was the part of using a 3D camera with After Effects and using a Blue Screen with live motion video with a person and adding a mask to composite over a special effect like we have all seen in major movie productions or weathermen broadcasting, it is all explained in laymens terms, there is stuff in this book that you will not find in other books that cover this subject

User review
Excellent Resource
I highly recommend this book. It's full of important information and is very easy to follow. My projects now have a much more polished look to them.

User review
A Great Book to learn the basics of After Effects
This is a great book if you know Flash and want to begin learning how to use After Effects. Since I have purchased this book Im beginning to feel comfortable in after Effects and it is bringing my animations and interfaces to a while new level with the mixture of Flash and After Effects. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to take their animations to the next level.