Looking for advice on compositing knowledge. There’s a lot of dead end type search results out there. A little cash isn’t a terrible thing to waste. Any recommendations on pay for tuts, courses, or (e)books of the specific or all encompassing type welcomed.
I can’t recommend specifically for Blender as I use other stuff myself mostly, but all the concepts are valid independent of the software you use.
Books:
- “Digital Compositing for Film and Video” by Steve Wright
- “The Art and Science of Digital Compositing” by Ron Brinkmann
First one is more practical for starters, second has more of a philosophical look on the field.
Courses:
- Nuke courses in fxphd.com, there are some very good ones. If interested, I can suggest based on your needs and level, I have taken almost all of them.
- Advanced Keying Breakdown series by Tony Lyons, is free in youtube. Very deep-through stuff on greenscreen compositing, best free material on the topic by far.
Thanks kesonmis.
My level is probably in the negative factor currently and that’s fine. I’m done a few of the modeling free tuts out there and well, I don’t really foresee modeling being much of an issue. Tedious and time consuming perhaps but, not really an issue. IMO, modeling is probably the least technical and learning curve prohibitive aspects of this type of software. Maybe some of the deep-tricks are not so simple but as a whole. I"m just really about learning right now. I follow some tutorials and one of the latest I’ve done has sparked a deeper interest in compositing. It appears to be both simple and complex (when layering nodes) but done well, the difference good compositing skills can make seem apparent to me. So, I’ve been fooling around with an exploring things. But most videos out there don’t really give you an understanding of what’s going on. Color number 1’s blue, number 2’s red, 4’s are black, and so on and so forth. The closest one to truly explaining is from Mr. Price that’s ages old.
(To note: my overall intentions with blender are to make 3d animations for my son)
I’m interested in courses. And I think after the next month or so of just fooling around in the dark a bit longer with tuts and the free stuff out there, I’ll have a better idea for an attack plan or, ideal course path. As I intend to take several. I’m not against needing a new bookshelf in the office either. As the note mentions, I think it’s important to be generally “well educated and skilled” (fingers crossed) in all areas of the program. Reasonably, I think it’s too early in my endeavors to know wholeheartedly which aspect I might excel at or prefer. In my mind, getting the animation/rigging right will be the most tedious or time consuming aspect. I think I am saving that for last. Why animate anything that looks like a pile of garbage? lol
Who knows, if the passion works out right, perhaps a field change would be in order down the road. Deep searching, I’ve picked up a few tips that are simply must haves for moving nodes and deleting them while maintaining the links in the tree. This helps so much with just experimenting and sometimes trouble shooting. My second area of focus right now are the physics aspects. And I must be off to address a question in that arena!