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A little advice for newbie. AE v.s. Shake
Greetings, I’m just getting into the wonderfully creative and complexe work of compositing. I too want to let my imagination run wild and show people the crazy idea’s in my head. But what’s the best way to do it?
I’ve been using Final Cut Pro for the last 6 months, and I’ve dabbled in Motion as well, but I have little or no experience with Shake or AE so I’m putting it to the experts.
If I’m going to spend my time, teaching myself to be an efficient and productive compositor I’d like to make sure I’m learning with the right program.
My question comes down to this, what program should I invest my time learning? Shake or Adobe After Effects.
My purpose, I want to had gun shots, muzzle flairs, moons behind clouds, and I want to be able to do it to moving shots. And especially this:
There’s two main composites I want to make for a short film I’ve been working on.
1) I have 1-3 actors wearing cop uniforms, but I want 30 of them crawling a hill side. The shot is a moving shot. Is that going to be really hard?
2) I want to replace a dusk blue sky with a dark starry sky, for a shot that follows a stun man jumping off a huge bridge. The storie calls for the sceen to be night time, and the best we could get on digital was after the sun went down but before it was too dark to film. In the end the sky is much too light.
I’m really looking foward to learning about compositing, I really admire the work and creativity of all you compositing artists and any advice you could offer me would be of tremendous help.
Will Keir
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4 Replies
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Well, my experience is mostly in After Effects, but I have dabbled a bit with Shake. As far as I can see, After Effects is more of an allrounder, with better ability to work with motion graphics, while Shake is a much more specialized compositing program. Again, I have very little experience with Shake, but the workflow appealed to me.
I have done a lot of compositing in After Effects, and it has so far covered all my needs. Just needs a bit of creativity to find the right solutions. It’s no problem tracking moving footage, and adding muzzle flair, clouds, replace skies, faces of actors, combine greenscreen shots with other footage, etc.
As for duplicating people, and making a realistic crowd, I have never looked into it. But it sounds to me like you could have a hard time doing your cop-trick with three actors in a moving shot. I am not saying it can’t be done, but it sounds to me like a big effort.
Oh, and don’t depend too much on my answers. Compositing is not my main profession, I have done it for some music videos and short films, but mostly just to give myself a challenge. My main line of work is cinematography.
John-Erling Holmenes Fredriksen
https://www.runaroundfilm.no/ -
i do a lot of motion graphics and compositing; and i generally use AE for the former, Combustion for the latter. If you’re looking into going into compositing – and specialising in it – I would go Shake hands down. It’s a great program; you’ll increase your employability as well. As much as i love AE – i don’t use it to composite. Sure it can pull a key etc – but it is definately more suited to motion graphics. The biggest thing for me is not being able to get splines on my mask so I can feather at each individual control point. That’s a must for rig/wire removal + rotoscoping.
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compositing a shot like that is going to be very difficult if not impossible no matter what program, if your camera is not locked down. in the movies, they can do stuff like that becasue they have a robotic camera that moves exactly the same way on each pass.
You should consider locking down your camera for that shot. On the other hand, if you are filming the cops on a green screen and you’ve already filmed the hillside, you *may* be able to film each actor doing his thing standing and moving the right way (Facing the right direction… etc.), and then motion track elements of the BG, and place the cops in there to track along with it. However it’s likely this won’t look great. As far as the better program, Shake, I’m told, is much better at this sort of operation, but After Effects can do it.
As far aws your night shot – There are plugins (even within AE) that can simulate the darkness of a nighttime shoot. And Andrew Kramer has a tutorial here on sky replacement that may or may not help you get those stars that you want:
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
Learning compositing is your challenge. Not learning which program to spend your time with. If you spent a year learning simply the art and science of compositing, it would take you a week on each program to get up to speed on both.
AE is layer based. Shake is node based. In my book when doing motion graphics I much prefer layer based. When doing FX I waaaaay prefer node based.
Both are brilliant programs and in the hands of a brilliant compositor, both will sing.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com
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