This overview page also serves as a good starting point, and this set of tutorials is continually being updated by folks here at Adobe.ĥ. There are also many free video tutorials from the After Effects CS6: Learn By Video series and After Effects CS5: Learn By Video series by Angie Taylor and me, a DVD and book series created specifically to teach the basics of After Effects. I recommend starting with this set of video tutorials provided by Adobe, Andrew Devis’s After Effects Basics series, or Andrew Kramer’s Video Copilot Basic Training series, all of which are free.
Once you’ve gotten a general sense of where things are and how the software works, you can really dig into a set of video tutorials that walk you through the basics.
Extensive courses that get into some details If you prefer video training, then I recommend the Classroom: After Effects CS5 video series by Adam Shaening-Pokrasso.Ĥ. Actually, I recommend those books in their entirety for beginners. I especially recommend the excerpt from Chris and Trish Meyer’s After Effects Apprentice and the excerpt from the After Effects Classroom in a Book, both of which guide you by the hand through creating some simple animations, explaining things along the way. You’ll see that on this page there are a few links to other resources that give a general overview of what After Effects is and the basics of how it works. Next, follow along with this very simple set of three videos, which show you the basics of importing media, trimming footage, animating with keyframes, adding effects, and exporting to Vimeo, YouTube, and other common formats using Adobe Media Encoder.ģ. You won’t learn many details, but you’ll break the ice and get a sense that this After Effects thing isn’t going to be so hard, after all.
It’s just a quick warm-up that takes you from nothing to creating a simple movie. Take a few minutes to follow the step-by-step instructions in this tutorial. This page covers much of the same information as the video, but it also gives links to additional resources for more information. Then read this brief introduction to the basic workflow and fundamental concepts in After Effects. Watch this brief video overview of the basic workflow, fundamental concepts, and most used parts of the user interface.
Hence this post, which I hope will give beginners a good idea of how to start learning After Effects. I understand the temptation to get straight to doing the cool stuff, but I always find myself guiding people back to learning the basics first because–well, to stick with my metaphor–I want people to swim, not flail and drown in the deep end.
I see evidence that a lot of people just dive into the deep end with After Effects (and other creative software). Getting started with After Effects (CS4, CS5, CS5.5, CS6, & CC)