# Good BOOK Recommendation for learning Adobe After Effects? Premier?



## cayenne (Sep 26, 2013)

I've been watching YouTube vids on AE, and while many are good, I usually like to learn something with a well put together book that takes you through learning from the interface and doing project examples....

For example for PS I've got Lesa Snider's "Photoshop CS6 The Missing Manual" as well as the Adobe classroom in a book on CS6.

Can someone give recommendations for a good book like this for Adobe After Effects?
Any solid recommendations on same type book for Adobe Premier?

I recently bought the CS6 Production Suite..so, looking to start learning all these tools...

Thanks in advance,

cayenne


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Sep 26, 2013)

I think that learning it is something that can't be done by a book. That might be the best you can do, but it takes a year of college level courses to get a good start, you definitely need to work with it every day.

If you are like me, you might just use a 1% subset of the features, but learning the whole thing is far beyond my capability. I think that in reality, there are specialists who know parts of it very well, and work together to produce video at the pro level.


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## dave (Sep 26, 2013)

Not a book but I reckon Lynda.com is perfect. They give you project files and the courses have really clear structure which is probably where the YouTube method can fall down.


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## cayenne (Sep 26, 2013)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> I think that learning it is something that can't be done by a book. That might be the best you can do, but it takes a year of college level courses to get a good start, you definitely need to work with it every day.
> 
> If you are like me, you might just use a 1% subset of the features, but learning the whole thing is far beyond my capability. I think that in reality, there are specialists who know parts of it very well, and work together to produce video at the pro level.



Actually, I tend to pick things up VERY quickly, especially when I'm interested (or there is significant money to be made)...last year, I picked up a book and learned an entirely new programming language/paradigm with Labview...and within a couple of months, I'd read and constructed a whole testing unit complete with GUI for a contract I had...that ended up testing systems on helicopters.

So, I really do learn quick if I have a good book with solid examples to follow at first...

I suppose I can get the Classroom in a book from Adobe, which do seem generally pretty good, but was seeing if there was a recommended "bible' for learning AE and Premier.

I have the basic ideas of editing from FCPX (I picked that up quite quickly)...so, I know now about the very basics of trying to edit, etc...but the interface for the Adobe products is the older style with multiple tracks instead of the magnetic single timeline that FCPX has...so, need to work through some example to get that concept down.

I'm picking up Photoshop extended too...that's not terribly hard to figure out, a LOT of stuff, but the idea of layers, masks, etc..I'm picking up on that pretty quickly....AE actually reminds me, so far, a bit of how PS works.

I'm also watching classes on CreativeLive which help...but again, I just know that I do best when I have a dead tree book I can follow along with using set examples to get started.

Thanks for the input everyone...if anyone thinks of a great primer, please add to this thread!!


cayenne


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