Curve editor: Reading material to master

Hi,
i really need to learn the ins and outs of the curve editor, specially how to increase or decrease speed of camera movements in an animation. Any tips on what i need to read up on? Are the Max tutorials that come with max 8 good enough…any one have any other ideas.

I only do Arch. Viz and its 99% of the time only camera animation and i normally dont use spline paths, but just set up keyframes and then try and adjust in between.

Acceleration and de-acceleration beats me.

Any suggestions?
Thanks
Vivek

Can’t really help you on the spline/handles thing, but some general tips for settung up a camera animation: Use a main dummy for translation and link three other dummys to it, each for its rotaion axis, better you name them properly (rot_x ect.) and lock all other transforms. For the camera, that is linked to the last dummy, you can create kind of a “steadycam” when connecting it with a spring controller. This really helped us to smooth out little “spikes” in movement.

Regards, Michael