With After Effects 7 released, the After Effects 6.5 Magic book from James Ranking and Anna Ullrich would seem obsolete, but it isn’t. This book teaches you how to create professional-looking compositing projects in 22 lessons. There are hundreds of techniques used in this book.

The After Effects 6.5 Magic book comes with a DVD containing the chapter material and finished movies for each project lesson. The authors used After Effects for most of the effects they explain. In some projects they used other Adobe applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator. In others they used Zaxwerks’ Invigorator, a tool which isn’t delivered with After Effects 7.0 anymore.

Instead, the new version of Adobe’s compositing application now comes with an older version of Color Finesse.

One of the nicest projects in this book explains how you can create a heartbeat monitor animation quickly using After Effects. The result looks stunningly well.

Each chapter explains step by step how to proceed for the project at hand to finish correctly, i.e. as it should look from viewing the finished movie. This approach has always bothered me somewhat because it limits the reader to following what the author cooks up. The authors of this Magic book have found a way to avoid that by adding a short paragraph at the end of most chapters, called “Try this”.

These short paragraphs are a call to action to the reader in order to improve the resulting project by adding features of performaning some additional steps.