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AE over F.Cut
I’m a part-time AE instructor in the film/video program at my local CC.
My students know Final Cut, and they’re always asking why they should use AE. Not knowing Final Cut, I can’t specifically answer the question, although I have my educated guess.
If some knowledgable FC and AE users could supply me with SPECIFIC situations where AE is preferable to FC, I’d be much obliged. Thanks!
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3 Replies
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FCP is a NLE, AE is a motion graphics tool. Although their functions cross over, neither do a great job of what the other is designed for.
AE is leaps and bounds ahead of FCP in compositing quality. All motion graphics in FCP have noticeably lower quality anti-aliasing, edge artifacts etc. With the advent of 32 bit float etc, the quality of the two is not even comparable.
Motion blur in FCP is virtually unusable it is so bad, other than as a weird effect. AE motion blur is quite nice.
The text tool in FCP is also virtually unacceptable the quality is so poor. The Boris 3D text plugin is quite reasonable, but clumsy for constant use.
Animating movement with keyframes in FCP is a big pain. The keyframe and motion graph interface are very clumsy and fairly inaccurate. Whatever people think of AE’s graph editor, it’s certainly a huge step above those in FCP.
While FCP imports layered PSDs, it’s ability to manage them when they change is poor – FCP gets very confused when a PSD changes after import. AE does not, it accepts any changes without significant problem.
This isn’t meant to be an attack on FCP. FCP is a GREAT NLE, and it’s compositing tools are actually pretty good for an NLE. But they are no substitute for a purpose-built specialised app like AE.
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Many Thanks, that’s exactly what I needed to know.
Like you say, nobody’s knocking FC, I just need specific functional differences– otherwise, you know “kids”, they’ll try to use a screwdriver as a chisel.
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I think you’re too easy on your students, Eric. Give them a difficult task that can’t be done in an NLE, or one would be a real pain to do in an NLE. Then do the same thing in AE.
Like masking an irregular shape, maybe.
Or dustbusting.
Or rotoscoping.
They should look at COW AE tutorials then try to do the same things in an NLE.Once I saw an Avid editor try to hide a white line that was 1-pixel wide and about 40 pixels high. Took him a half-hour by masking out sides of the video. In AE, that would have been less than 5 minutes: dupe footage, draw 2-point mask just 1 px to the right of the line, apply stroke to reveal original, move dupe 1 px to left. Done. To be fair, maybe other Avid editors would have been faster than this guy.
Now I really like FCP, but it ain’t no compositor.
Just like AE ain’t no editor.To generalize:
AE is “vertical”, layer-oriented.
NLEs are “horizontal”, time-oriented.Steve
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