Shake tutorials/books
by Mattdawgpro
on
Apr 25, 2007 at 4:53:07 pm
Hi everyone,
I'm just starting out with Shake, comming from a Final Cut/Motion/After Effects background, and I was wondering what good books and tutorials there are out there for a newbie trying to learn the mechanics of the software? Thanks for the help,
Matt
Re: Shake tutorials/books by Burt Hazard on Apr 25, 2007 at 9:02:23 pm
Of course you can start with the tutorial book that comes with Shake, then I would recommend:
SHAKE 4:
PROFESSIONAL COMPOSITING AND VISUAL EFFECTS
Marco Paolini
(Apple Pro Training, ISBN: 0-321-25609-3)
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VISUAL EFFECTS:
THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CREATING EFFECTS IN SHAKE, MOTION, AND AFTER EFFECTS
Damian Allen and Brian Connor
(Apple Pro Training, ISBN: 0-321-30334-2)
DIGITAL COMPOSITING FOR FILM AND VIDEO
Steve Wright
(Focal Press, ISBN: 0-240-80760-X)
as the core training books; the Steve Wright book is more general nodal compositing theory and the ENCYCLOPEDIA is basically a Shake "cookbook," which contains an excellent overview of a lot of the compositing situations you will run into (and contains tiny snippets of AE and Motion info as well). Actually, now that I'm more up to speed on Shake myself, I've gone back to the Steve Wright book, gleaned some information, then I've gone straight over to the ENCYCLOPEDIA for Shake specifics on how to achieve the effects. For a specific example, I adapted Wright's tip on doing a "final" composite, then adding light/background wrap, then adding an edge blend, in that order, and then going back to he ENCYCLOPEDIA for the light wrap and edge blend recipes, and the results are darn good.
For further edification, I can also recommend the Focal Press books by the two former BBC effects guys:
VISUAL EFFECTS FOR FILM AND TELEVISION
Mitch Mitchell
(Focal Press, ISBN: 0-24051-675-3)
CREATING SPECIAL EFFECTS OF TV AND VIDEO
Bernard Wilkie
(Focal Press, ISBN: 0-240-51474-2)
The Bernard Wilkie book focuses more on practical special effects, but it's a great resource. And although the Mitch Mitchell book is slightly dated, it's good for getting you to think in the right direction about compositing. For a specific example, he talks about achieving ghost effects by shooting a normally lit set, then shooting the actors against a darkened or black version of the same set in order to get a nice blown-out transparency when mixing the two, and I achieved a similar effect in Shake using rotoscoping (myself for the test!) in a room, then shooting a clean plate, then using a Color Replacement node (for a nice green) and a Screen node for the final comp.
And I'm sure someone else can chime in about the DVD training available, which I will get around to eventually.
Re: Shake tutorials/books by stunix on Apr 26, 2007 at 9:35:56 pm
About 6 months ago I bought the Shake Training series from Gnomon. It was very informative and can give some great information you may not pick up from certain books. The dvd series is pretty expensive but I feel it was worth it.
