I’m so excited to let you know that my book is in printing and should be shipping at the end of the month. It is available to order from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, etc. I’ll start this thread to answer any questions or comments.
The book was budgeted to be 500 pages total, (whew!~) and has about 450 written/illustrated pages and then the index, table of contents, etc. It is in FULL COLOR, and includes a DVD with over 4Gb of files and exercises and professional stock video, including a lot from Orange and Peach - mattes, backdrops, textures, etc.
I wrote the book to fill the gap in the Blender “library” of books; mine addresses all the special effects processing, masking, and practical uses for every node, and in-depth on the latest sequencer, to use Blender in a video production pipeline/environment. Tony’s book fully explores character animation and fluids and cloth, so I do not spend one page on those. Rolands and Carsten’s books address modeling, and For Dummies is a good reference overall.
I focus on film and video production and post-production, and what Blender supports and how-to do all those neat effects, including camera matching, lip-sync, match-moving, etc. to get your Blender models “integrated” over a live action plate. It was more work than I dreamed, all nights/weekends/days etc, both by myelf, Roland, and my editorial team (I had like two editors review everything) so hopefully the global community will buy it and we can all be compensated for our efforts.
If you see a rip-off site with any of the Blender books, please alert me or the appropriate author so we can all fight piracy, and allow money to flow toward future editions (like to match up to 2.5 when it is released).