Portal tutorials - visit Tips too! Opening a Door in After Effects -- This exercise explores "how things happen" when using the Basic 3D filter to simulate opening a door. You should acquire a basic understanding of both anchor points and the rendering pipeline. Clearcut Mattes -- Using mattes to put video inside layers in After Effects. Also explains the Rendering Pipeline. Writing Text in After Effects:Or There are Always Too Many Ways to Do Things -- Here is a simple method to animate the writing of fancy text using the Write-on filter and a Track Matte. There's even acknowledgment of other ways to animate writing. Masking Tutorial for Adobe After Effects 3.1 -- includes concise instructions for using the pen tool. Gradients on a Path for Gradient Wipes -- With a little experimentation, it's easy to make custom gradients for After Effects or Premiere -- and especially fun when used in Pinnacle Systems' ReelTime dual-stream NLE.     Print/Video tutorials (visit Tips too!) There are two books with CD tutorials. The standout is Adobe After Effects 3.1 : Classroom in a Book, June 1997, Hayden Books; ISBN: 1568303696. This CIB was written by some the leading users of AE (including Trish and Brian below), and edited and tested by Adobe's training department. New users should see especially Trish's technical appendix and Lynda Weinman's tutorial that introduces the simplicity and power of the Time Layout window by animating cats on pogo sticks. In this tutorial, Lynda shows AE's timing controls and how to duplicate and offset layers and keyframes to speed the animation process. The other book covers 3rd party filters more but is weaker overall: Real World After Effects, by Eric Reinfeld and Sherry London, October 1997, Addison-Wesley. DV Magazine has a large collection of tutorials collected in the DV Reader's Corner Archive. DV publishes monthly motion graphics tutorials by Trish Meyer,who teaches an advanced AE class at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. There are also other AE experts on board and other articles of interest, so you may consider a subscription. Chris Meyer has written a number of articles involving AE for Interactivity Magazine, but they don't seem to have made it to the Web. Interactivity often publishes reviews and other information useful to AE users. Res magazine began a regular column on AE by Brian Maffitt. They also have regular short tips on AE filters by a variety of artists. Brian Maffitt's video tutorials on AE, AE filters and other DV topics are available from Total Training. Total AE and the others are expensive, but there's not a single better resource (TotalAE tapes are even consulted by people working at ILM). Brian also offers a couple of good free tutorials from the AOL forum days.     Web-based tutorials (visit Tips too!) Adobe's tips for After Effects -- 7 Web tutorials explaining keyframes, the Venetian Blind transition, animating a Track Matte over time, using Motion Math, animating to audio with Motion Math, and staggering layers. There are a several useful tutorials in PDF format on the AE install CD. learn Dynamic Media -- has an extensive collection of tips, including information on AE rendering settings for a variety of codecs, adapting print graphics, converting fields to frames and vice versa, safe action area templates, maximizing the use of hard drive space, displacement mapping in After Effects. The WWUG (Worldwide Users Group) has several articles on AE among its nearly 100 articles on digital video topics. There's also several user forums available. Jim Heid features AE in many of his articles and reviews. See particularly his After Effects Secrets from the May 1997 issue of Macworld. Rendering to Avid codecs is explained in an Avid After Effects Settings walkthrough. Toolfarm, a reseller, has tutorials or links including Creating Cel Animations by Todd Sines. Forrest Brown has posted a tutorial on using After Effects to create a cell shader look from 3D renders. EI Resources, a Web site on Electric Image (Mac; soon porting to NT), has several tutorials involving AE. Craig Lyn's 3D column in DV Magazine sometimes involves AE compositing; see especially those on multipass rendering, the attenuation of reflection, depth of field, and explosions. Knoll Lens Flare Pro comes with AE project files by John Knoll of ILM (one of the originators of Photoshop). These files demonstrate compositing of multipass renders of 3D project. Use AE to adjust specular values in near real-time, instead of rerendering entire scenes. Todd Sines has a tutorial on the Simple Choker filter (Production Bundle); it also appeared in the Summer 1998 issue of Res magazine. Want to make a dancing man made of fruit? See "Motion Capture Animation with AE", by David Rauch, at the DV site. There's downloadable project of this tutorial, which uses Motion Tracking and Motion Math to do character animation. I've seen the commercial -- its good.   Plug-in tutorials Forge offers three tutorials and a manual in PDF format for FreeForm for After Effects. To download the FreeForm manual or one of the tutorials, go to the downloads section. DigiEffects Creative Tips is a three part series of tutorials. Panopticum Lens and Fire tutorials are promised but still in the planning stage. Brian Maffitt's video tutorials on Final Effects and Studio Effects are available from Total Training.       Have a tutorial to link? Please send links (or even tutorials) to RYoung097@aol.com   Copyright © Rich Young 1998 Synesthetic Media Connections Many thanks to the SFSU Multimedia Studies Program for hosting this site.