A solid investment that will broaden your After Effects skills

A New Solid is the latest training release from Creative Cow host Eran Stern. The DVD includes a wide range of After Effects tutorials, consisting of a combination of full-size versions of Eran’s Creative Cow Podcast tutorials and five more advanced, previously unreleased tutorials.

The content includes motion graphic and visual effects techniques and is suitable for beginner to advanced After Effects users. None of the lessons are complicated but beginners should understand the interface before jumping in to this title. Read more…

Todd Kopriva (Adobe) has posted a simple recipe for radial rays using an After Effects Shape Layer.

This clip by Oren Lavie is a lovely example of stop-motion animation. Quite mesmerizing.

Coremelt is a relatively new player in the After Effect plug-in market, with a wide range of inexpensive Mac OSX-only plug-ins that are all 16bit and GPU-accelerated. In this chat with Coremelt’s Roger Bolton we discuss the origins of Coremelt and it’s plug-in range, with specific focus on the Shatter and Luminous products. Coremelt is also offering a $30 discount Read more…

Maltaannon.com has posted a short Adobe After Effects  tutorial demonstrating how to create a Magic Bullet Looks-style shutter streak effect.

Just received the Motion Designer’s Toolkit and Compositor’s Toolkit from Digital Juice. I always disregarded Digital Juice as being only for editors who needed canned backgrounds… Man was I out of touch. Look out for a full review soon.

This screen capture of a recent trade show presentation for Adobe demonstrates working with the video in Photoshop CS4 Extended. Topics include importing, trimming, interpreting, touch up, color correction, Smart Filters and Exporting. You’ll also learn how as an After Effects user, you could include these features in your workflow. Watch tutorial

Over at CGTutsplus Tomas Sinkunas demonstrates how to use Maxon Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects to build a fun dancing ice cream animation in 126 simple steps.