Tip 2: Best place to learn Adobe After Effects?
So now you know what After Effects is capable of, where do you start learning about it? It’s a great time to begin because not only are there a multitude of incredible online resources and books but the amount of free accessible content is growing by the day.
“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”
Mark Twain
What do you want to learn?
The question then becomes what do you actually want to learn? Depending on your interests will depend on where you go. For some it will be learning Visual Effects and for others it may be Motion Graphics but my first piece of advice is to learn the basics. Understand the User Interface. Learn how to import files. Spend time figuring out how to animate properties of a layer. This will then help solidify your foundational knowledge of the software and how it translates to any discipline.
Let’s delve a little deeper. How do you prefer to learn? Are you more into reading books or do you prefer to dive right in and figure it out on the fly? Other people prefer watching video tutorials and in the last decade this style of learning has risen astronomically thanks to the likes of YouTube and other video platforms.
After Effects has a great community of individuals who spend their time paying forward what they have learned. Lots of tutorials that are uploaded come from different artists working in different fields thus delivering tutorials with unique perspectives.
My initial experience
I remember my first experience of learning After Effects. At this time there were limited forums and no YouTube tutorials to speak of… it was 2006. I was recommended a book called ‘Adobe After Effects 7.0 in a Classroom’ and wow… my mind was blown. It was jam packed with so much great concise information. This really gave me my first insight into how to correctly add effects and modify layer properties of my footage and use tools like masks.
I spent quite a lot of time self-initiating projects and jumping from those to examples in the book but still, learning the program was a sloppy process.
A few years passed then I got seriously back into After Effects. This was around 2010 while at university but again I found the path to learning quite patchy. There rarely seemed to be a consistent way to learn the basics or look specifically at certain areas of interest.
Website idea
This is where the idea for After Effects Beginner came from. I wanted a resource which aggregated and consolidated all of the best training material in one place.
After Effects Beginner has been specifically set up to help you learn After Effects for free in the most time efficient way possible. We have taken the frustration out of knowing where to look by simply creating playlists of high quality tutorials that will take you step by step through the fundamentals of learning after effects.
We all have the same amount of time so let’s use it wisely.
The website is organised into three distinct sections.
After Effects Beginner sections:
Start Here
The first section ‘Start Here’ has three video playlists. It starts with learning the basics of After Effects and then moves on to more intermediate and advanced topics like Expressions and Scripting.
Learning the basics is a seven part video course by Adobe featuring the amazing and talented Evan Abrams and Sergei Prokhnevskiy. They run you through the interface, understanding compositions, learning about text layers and working with keyframes.
Tutorials
The ‘Tutorials’ section is a regularly updated hand curated collection of the best videos the community has provided. Dive head first right into any tutorial and start learning something new!
Resources
Finally the ‘Resources’ section is a comprehensive directory of After Effects community forums. You will also find more intermediate and advanced topics such as expressions and scripting. For now though we’ll just stick to the basics.
Why don’t you give these a try and let us know how you get on.