The Most Complicated Video Software Ever (And the most powerful!)

I have put together a travel video featuring the nine waterfalls we could get to in Oregon in late May and Crater Lake. Access was limited by retained snow that hadn't been plwed or melted yet. We chose to go in May to insure that there was enough water flow to make the falls impressive. Wrong! Too early. Wait until July or August.

The sequencing of the various clips is completed and the features needed are better sound editing and an impressive opening title sequence. For that latter purpose I turned to Adobe After Efects CS4. I had bought two books among the few supporting After Effects; Adobe After Effects CS4 Classroom In A Book (CIAB) and Peachpit Press After Effects CS4 Visual Quickpro Guide .

The former runs you through a series of lessons illustrating what you might accomplish using this software. It leads you through the necessary steps but it fails to explain why you are doing these steps and what other variations are available in the process.

PeachPit's book by Antony Bolante is so much superior to CIAB that you can only charactorize the 381 page CIAB as the Kindergarten primer to Bolante's graduate program. How that guy can faithfully document all of the features in only 500 pages is a minor miracle.

The only faults I could complain about in Bolante's book is that it is not colored and the graphics are smaller and harder to see. As you would expect from an imaging company like Adobe, the graphics are beautiful even if the text isn't.

I'm 76 years old and about 2/3rds of the way through Bolante's book. (I've worked my way through all of CIAB lessons. But the point of this blog is to state that After Effects is the most complicated application that I have ever tried to learn since my 1980 Apple II DOS Basic and Assembly Language. But at the same time, with AE CS4, you control and automate every aspect of the video you are editing. Almost nothing is impossible using it.

Surprizingly it is used mostly for short compositions that you drop into  within more gereral applications like Premiere Pro or Elements. Other uses are to modify clips that are giving you problems or need some spicing up in those programs.

After Effects is a costly program ($999 list, $299 upgrade list, $798 Amazon, $398 student) and there is no After Effects Elements (yet). It's definitely for the dedicated video editor.