Why did we write this book? We love After Effects. We use it ourselves almost every day to create motion graphics for our clients. We teach After Effects classes, give lectures, and consult one-on-one. And you know what makes us feel really good? When people learn a new trick or tip, smile, and say, "Wow!"

We still learn new tricks every day, and we still smile and say, "Wow!" We wanted to pass that excitement along. As much as we love this program, we can't teach everywhere, we can't answer the phone every night at 3 a.m. (our wives and roommates would kill us), and we can only get across so many tips in the time allotted to us at conferences.

So we wrote a book. The idea was to give the reader the cream off the top of the milk just the good stuff. After Effects is a great program, with tons of features and shortcuts; the problem is separating the cream from the skim milk.

If you read every tech document on the web, perused every page of the manual, attended all of the Adobe training courses, and hung out with all the other AE uber-geeks, you'd have a bounty of knowledge (trust us, we have and we do). But you have a life, a job, and no time to dig to find those gems. If you're impatient, on a deadline, or just can't stand to look at another "Getting Started with After Effects" book, this book is...