Andrew
Kramer from VideoCopilot has been teaming up with the folks
at Creative Cow to create After Effects-related Flash training
videos for some time now. Well, now he's taken some of the
professional special effects training for After Effects
7 and brought it to a computer-playable DVD. The ten tutorials
that he covers in this set are at the forefront of low budget
film effects, like creating green-screened explosions or
generating muzzle flashes using only After Effects 7.
And the cool thing is that these effects look tight!
The muzzle flashes, for example, come as close as I've seen
to the ones created in Apple Shake for Alex Ferrari's Broken.
This really is an amazing set of training, but I do have one large complaint about how this was distributed on DVD: it wasn't converted from Flash nor have the nice folks at Creative Cow provided any way to install the flash training on your computer. This means that you have
to play the Flash video from your DVD while using After
Effects 7. The problem with this is that Flash uses
up a fair amount of RAM and CPU power, as does After Effects
7, so that, when you combine that with the DVD throughput
speed, you have a tendency to have pauses and stutters in
playback. When I tried the training on our low-level 2 Ghz
machine with 512 MB of RAM, the pauses and stutters happened
as much as once every 20 to 30 seconds. Even on our fast
computer, we ran into more stutters than we noticed with
Total Training's Quicktime-based, installable training
systems.
Additionally,
this Flash training doesn't have the keyboard functionality of the Quicktime-based
training used by Total Training, so you can't just hit the space bar to pause the
training, but must mouse over and click the flash panel
any time you need to pause. Also, you can't resize the training
window the way you can in a Quicktime based application,
which means you can't have it open side by side with After
Effects 7 even if there weren't skipping issues. Due
to these problems, I ended up playing the training off a
separate computer from the one I had After Effects 7
on, which, while it did yield non-stuttering playback, was
a pain. (Of course, if you're running a dual processor computer
with a decent amount of RAM, this probably won't
be an issue.)
Since
installation and interactive bookmarks weren't desired in
this set, I personally would have liked to see them convert it to video and then burning it to two
traditional video DVDs. This would have decreased the RAM
and CPU requirements tremendously and would have allowed
custom resizability of the video window. Sure, it would
have taken an extra DVD to fit the training and the files
onto, but, in my opinion, it would have been worth it in when it comes to
ease of use.
