Wow!  What a program!  AfterEffects is a very powerful program that creates excellent results.

I came in to after effects with experience in Flash Video and some experience with Premium Elements.  I thought I would open the program and be able to learn it very quickly.  There are so many options that learning After Effect quickly is not possible.  Because the After Effects panels were slightly different than other Adobe products and very different than the old Macromedia products it was easy to get a little lost without additional help. 

After some advice from the net on the best book for beginners, I took a more structured look at After Effects.  Even with the aid of two books, I found After Effects to be even more powerful with more tools than I first realized.  Following the examples in the book, I was able to do some cool effects to still images, short videos, and a combination of the two.  I feel after using the Classroom in a Book curriculum that I would be able to do basic effects on my own projects.  But I know that I have barely scratched the surface of the interface.

The After Effects help menu was a little confusing in that it assumed that the user knows all of the terms.  Sometimes the terms were foreign for a newby with a dictionary not available for some of the more advanced terms.  This can be a little daunting if a quick answer is needed.  The internet was very helpful but many of the answers did not come from an Adobe site.  This certainly does not detract from the program.  Anyone using After Effects should know this going into a project.

In 10 hours of working with After Effect on a laptop with 2 GB of RAM, I found the program to respond quickly with very little waiting for commands to be exectuted.  The initial starting of the program took a little over a minute but the program responded will after the initial load.  Only once did the program stop responding when working on an intense video project with many layers including some high resolution still images.  The end result was far superior to any flash created video effects I had created in the past.  I did not put any of my examples on a live web site to test out the speed across a net connection.  It would be interesting to see how much After Effect may slow down the animation.

Overall, I found the software to be very powerful and fun to use after learning the terminology.