The key to good project management is workflow, and also to ensure that all your pieces and parts will all come together in the final assembly. Design is no different.

This tutorial deals with some more advanced compositing techniques, and hopefully after watching the first tutorial, you'll have a good grasp of the basics and be ready to dive into this 3 video tutorial featuring advanced compositing using tags, multi-pass renders, and expressions in After Effects.

Before you hit 'play' there are a few points I want to make clear:

Yes, it's a monster (an hour long). But some of this stuff is very complicated, and I want to make sure if you've never even thought of this before, you'll still grasp it. Plus, if you think following it is hard, imagine recording this thing a total of five times before you're actually happy with it.

Apparently I didn't pay much attention to my note. You'll see (sorry f1a5h84ck, I tried).

I'm not trying to make things pretty, I'm trying to get you guys to learn...which is why this will be some of the ugliest work you've ever done, but hopefully using techniques that are new to you, and will stick.

Once again, the comments are to help me help you. Any tips, suggestions, questions, etc, throw them right there. I read them as often as I can, and respond when I'm able, so if you need anything specific, you can put it right there.

One thing I'm considering is to do an entire project from beginning to end - for example, a 'show open' for CGTuts+ screen casts. It would take you from beginning to end, giving some of you a taste of what it means to do this professionally. If that's something that sounds interesting, let me know. It would definitely be multi-part.