Training
Review: Serious Effects & Compositing, Pg. 2
Understandability
A very knowledgeable and powerful After Effects user, Andrew Kramer tends to blur the line between demonstrator and trainer. Whether because he was attempting to make the set fast paced to decrease boredom or because he is so familiar with After Effects 7, his pace was a little faster than I would have liked, even for an advanced training kit. I definitely got the feeling that he had either had twelve espressos before each training session or he was under serious time constraints and was trying to get a full Training Tutorial out in 1/2 of the time he should have had. (This would make sense for a Flash tutorial that was going up on the internet, but doesn’t make sense for a purchased DVD set.)
This translated into a number of times where I had to to rewind the Flash Video multiple times to see exactly what he did so that I didn’t get lost. This was especially true in the complex ‘Floating Text’ tutorial that was blurred through in ten minutes flat. While these would be big problems for a beginner training, I offer them as simple caveats for the advanced user they are intended for.
Depth of Information
There are only 10 tutorials and three hours of training in this set, but Andrew Kramer manages to cover a pretty large canvas of special effects, from compositing to motion tracking to muzzle flashes to explosion shockwaves to good-looking green screened car sequences. They even show you how to teleport people into new areas and how to make 3-D illusion mattes and hovering titles. Additionally, some of the tricks for finessing greate greenscreen mattes out of Keylight for undersampled footage I have found nowhere else.
Attention Captivation
Because each training tutorial is so fast and to the point, you will never have time to get bored. Additionally, Andrew’s voice has a strong innate interest level that makes his training compelling.
