by Rich Young, March 2008
Blogs/News
Pro Video Coalition is a collection of blogs with several writer from the DV magazine heydays, including Trish and Chris Meyer, Mark Christiansen, Frank Capria, and Adam Wilt.Prolost, by Stu Maschwitz (author of The DV Rebel's Guide) covers various aspects of Image Nerdery including AE, color, and AE project and preset giveaways.
Toolfarm markets DV tools, but also has plug-in information, tutorials, and a variety of interesting features to draw you in. AE Freemart, a part of the Toolfarm network, has seperate news and tutorial content.
Ko Maruyama started a new blog, Ninja Crayon. Stephen Schleicher has a ton of informative available stuff from his CreativeMac and other pursuits. Both post to DMN's After Effects Channel.
General Specialist has tips, tricks and tutorials for visual effects, motion graphics, animation and other tinkerings.
Motionworks and Motion Graphics 'n Such are blogs that offer a variety of tutorials.
Mylenium’s World of Wonders features pondering and insight.
Flowseeker is by Mark Christiansen, author of Adobe After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques.
Creative Workflow Hacks shares tips, scripts, links, and hacks; it's especially strong on AE and FCP XML.
Creative Cow is hosting blogs and has a blog aggregater that created a single catch-all blog, although probably limited to marketeering-approved links.
Michael Coleman, the product manager for Adobe After Effects, has a new blog called Keyframes. Adobe Product manager Steve Kilisky's Dynamic Media Blog has only occasional news. Steve Whatley's After Effects Cookbook is another Adobe insider blog that covers AE's 3D side, 3D application integration, 3rd party plug-ins, and workflow. DAV's TechTable by Business Development Manager Dave Helmly concentrates on Premiere Pro.
An Adobe blog called The Genesis Project hopes to help with new CS3 video features, especially for beginner/intermediate users. Adobe DV specialist Bob Donlon's Web TV had regular tutorials on the Production Studio, but is switching focus.
Product Manager John Nack on Adobe Photoshop has great stuff daily.
DV Magazine publishes regular tutorials by leading AE authors; other magazines like Studio Daily (now with a nice blog) and Layers can also be good AE resources.
AE Portal News has occasional news on After Effects and the world, and attempts to keep track of blogged news.
Podcasts (that discuss AE at times)
Aharon Rabinowitz's Creative Cow AE podcast is the only dedicated podcast and dependably regular at that.
Chad and Todd Perkins have a podcast series sorta called All Things Adobe, which covers Flash, AE, and other Adobe tools.Alex Lindsay holds forth as lead on This Week in Media, and as part of the team at MacBreak.
An established netshow, Digital Production Buzz (was The DV Guys) features useful information.
Plugged-In: The Digital Landscape Podcast is a new show sponsored by Toolfarm.FXGuide.com is doing podcasts, and includes an interview with Paul Debevec on how he invented HDR and where it's going.
Richard Harrington has a podcast as a part of his Photoshop for Video effort. The Adobe Creative Suite Podcast is hosted by Terry White, who has passion for InDesign and Photoshop.
Tutorials
Trish & Chris Meyer have their own blog at Pro Video Coalition, with more training coming onto Lynda.com.
Creative Cow's AE Tutorials are quite numerous and from many authors.
Andrew Kramer has good stuff for free for beginners and beyond.
Total Training offers a range of training on the web and DVD.
Ko Maruyama has bunch of tutorials stored up.
ayato@web has many good free tutorials.
Rhys-works.com has good free basic tutorials.
AE Portal and MographWiki are basic guides to the AE online world.
Free basics are offered in Xtreme-is-back video tutorials.
Various classes are offered on FX PhD.Layers magazine has tutorials by Steve Holmes.
You can use the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Video Workshop (movies organized in a nice Flash UI) to learn about any application you’re interested in, whether you own it or not. These are the movies from the Adobe Design Center, which also has a blog.
Russell Brown posts tutorials on Photoshop CS3 Extended, including tips and techniques for video.
The Anvel is now Motion Graphics Lab and offers training CDs and free projects.
Harry Franks also has stuff for free, in addition to training for expressions.
Various tutorials can also be found through aggregators like TutsBuzz and Tutorial Find, and even YouTube.
AE Plug-ins
AE Portal Plug-in Summary shows all AE plug-ins by vendor & platform on one page.
Toolfarm Plug-in Finder goes beyond a list with a searchable database, and includes filters for AE, Premiere, Apple Shake, Final Cut Pro, Autodesk!
Expressions, Scripting & Flash
JJ Gifford's Expressions in After Effects is basic but useful. Adobe is already offering a scripting guide for AE 8/CS3 at the Developer Center.
Other expression training can be found in books like Creating Motion Graphics With After Effects by Trish & Chris Meyer and Adobe After Effects Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen, as well as in video training like After Effects Pro: Professional Features by Total Training and After Effects Expressions Series 1 by Harry Franks.
Motionscript is Dan Ebberts' project-based resource for After Effects scripting and expressions (and there is a difference; for the user scripts are push button affairs).
redefinery from Jeff Almasol has a great script library along Scripting Fundamentals.
AE Enhancers is the scripting forum for AE.
Dr. Woohoo specializes in AE<-->Flash integration where Adobe leaves off.
Adobe engineer Bruce Bullis, keeper of the AE SDK, maintains the After Effects API Zone.
More valuable scripts and expressions can be found at: Creative Workflow Hacks who links to Armored Squirrel, colinbraley.com, crgreen.com, Leapfrog Productions, nabscripts, Peter Torpey. Cool scripts by Jeff Almasol are also in The DV Rebel's Guide by Stu Maschwitz.
Update: Harry Franks added a free intro video Expressions 101. to accompany his Toolfarm training sets.
After Effects Expression Controls is a 3-parter among others in the podcast series by Aharon Rabinowitz.
Lloyd Alvarez has collection of scripts for AE, including BG Renderer CS3, at his new domain, AE Scripts. Dave van Brink of QuickTime Music fame (and qt_tools) also has AE scripting nuggets at his blog, omino pixel blog. Chris Hatton, Michael Cardeiro, and AE Scripts have a few tricks to show too.
The blog post AE Scripts Galore may have additional info.
Online Forums/Lists
adobe.after.effects @ Google Groups
User Groups have dwindled to a few in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.
Inspiration & Sharing
Justin Cone and cohorts refer to many currents at the inspiration and reviews site Motionographer, the successor to Tween. They have a ton of good links.
xplsv.tv, FEED, MoGraph, Toolfarm, and TickleBooth are other sites for sharing and reviews.
DV News and Related Resources
CrispyFeeds, an RSS headline aggregator by FresHDV, and Pro Video Coalition have varied DV news.
Create Digital Motion and VJCentral have news for VJs and installation artists as well.
CinemaTech and NewTeeVee cover digital cinema, web, distribution, and other trends remaking the movies. A big part of the future of video is on the web, and more follow-the-money news can be found at TechCrunch, Techmeme, and GigaOM. Mashable blogs on social networking sites. Adobe Flash/Director guru John Dowdell ponders many interesting internet tidbits at JD on EP.
There's a fuller but still brief list of resources at AE Portal News.