Help Buying Total Training for AEF

RomanJaquez

RomanJaquez

Well-known member
I am planning on purchasing the Total Training for Adobe After Effects 6.5 (Professional Version) which cost $549.99: Experience Level: Beginner Through Advanced, Running Time: 47 Hours, 15 DVDs

...and then I saw that they have on special the Total Training for Adobe After Effects 6 (Professional Version) for $244.99: Experience Level: Beginner Through Advanced, Running Time: 42 Hours, 13 DVDs.

I have very little or no experience with After Effects and I own a copy of After Effects 6.5 (Professional Version).

What I would like to know is; Is it worth buying the 6.5 version over the 6 (considering price and content difference)? Being a beginner, would I miss much if I buy version 6 for less money instead of the 6.5?

Please let me know what you think.... I will appreciate very much your response.

Roman
 
Re: Help Buying Total Training for AEF

Roman- I think your best bet if your alittle concern with money is to find tutorials online(theres thousands) and learn them that way. Its free and sometimes are better than the total trainning DVD's. Don't get me worng, TT is really good because I've learn alot from them too. As for now, just search online. It's no really no differnt from the TT because you can do at your own convience. There are some free TT online that you can download. I usually go to creativecow.net to learn some AE stuff. You can also come here to DVX and theres people that are more willing to help.
 
i would never buy total trainings dvd:s.

i've learned everything just by sitting down with ae, maybe some smaller free tutorials on the net.

now i do believe i can do just about anything i wish for my movies. vfx stuff.
 
The best thing I ever did was watch Total Training. Before I watched it, I thought I knew a lot, and I was quite wrong. This was, of course, 10 years ago.. before there were free tutorials everywhere. Still, specific tutorials on how to blow up a head or make a grungey camera shake are no substitute for an A to Z lesson on After Effects.

To answer your question, getting a thorough education on AE6 will do you a lot of good. Supplement it with additional tutorials, but I'd advise against learning AE exclusively from free online tutorials.

Also, Total Training is available online, too.
 
Total Training will get you up to speed much quicker than harvesting online tutorials.
Online tutorials are fine except they rarely cover the fundamentals. Andrew's tute's are great, but they are intended for creating specific effects. If you learn the fundamentals you can create something from your own imagination. Isn't that the point, creating something new? Otherwise everyone is doing the same tutorials and all the work looks the same.
 
online tutorials are a great resource for learning AE. I've never had to use a training DVD, and I know AE pretty well. I learned most of my stuff from www.creativecow.net and www.videocopilot.net ... both are great resources for learning AE.

Granted, the training DVDs will take you by the hand and show you all the buttons etc. etc., but watching these tutorials is much more valuable than some might think. For instance, in Andrew Kramer's set extension tutorial, you 'learn' how to add castles to moving footage. By watching and analyzing it though, you also learn how to take advantage of null layers, how to effectively use motion tracking, and how to add cool color correction effects.

Another great AE resource that rarely gets mentioned is the manual. That book is huge.

EDIT: Also remember that After Effects is on version 8.0 (CS3), so training on version 6 would be useful, but you would be missing some of the new features, and I know some tools and effects have been moved or renamed since then.
 
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