Feature Comment: Neurology to After Effects

Practicing Neurologist Howard Silby turns to After Effects

“Your website, training, tuts, and unplugged series are outstanding! After 40 years as a practicing neurologist I decided to learn video editing, mainly to begin to archive our family’s life for the benefit of our 5 grandchildren. So, at age 68, I started with the Cassablanca system which allowed me to ease into the skill, I soon found it limiting and decided, with great trepidation, to jump into after effects. So, I purchased total training 6.5, and since have purchased every Cow series, Meyer’s books, total training series thru 7.0, many of lynda.com dvd’s, as well as in/out monthly membership to lynda.com, and take all tuts from you, and messrs.Rabinowitz, Maltaannon, Kramer, Velez, Holmes, etc etc and purchasing almost all of their and your products.

Trying to get into after effects in 2003 would be like you deciding today that you wanted to be a neurologist: I thought “alpha” was a dominant male, “channel” was something that held water, “mask” something the Lone Ranger wore, “transparency” something that defined a shallow person, “matte” something you wiped your feet on, and “travelling” something you did when you retired. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around “layers” and “duplicating”, etc. It all seemed counterintutive to my medically trained brain. Being color blind didn’t/doesn’t help any! But all of you helped me get from After Effects Ground Zero to 0.005% above ground zero, where I now still labor tring to learn this stuff. It’s great fun, and now I mainly continue in order to keep my brain challenged and stave off Alzheimer’s Disease.

Many thanks to all of you who have helped me acieve my limited AE skills that have made my 74 year old artistic life happy and fulfilled. The free stuff is terrific, but the bought stuff even better, and the two complement each other. I use Adobe CS4 with every plug in known to man/woman even tho I use almost none of the special effects when I produce a video since I don’t want the FX to be the story. But just knowing I can do some of the stuff is all the reward I need. On rare occaisions I use FX just to have fun. If you want, here’s a link to some intro fx stuff I did last week.”