After Effects and Flame

[Michael_camp]

https://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=5627844&linkID=5573089

[Michael Zoppo]

Haha, well I did not know it needs to run Linux, hmm thats interesting. I have a 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro

[Martti Ekstrand]

Also bear in mind that Flame is a pretty expensive piece of software. Unless you consider a quarter of a million dollars pocket change you’d might want to look at it’s baby brother Combustion instead which does run on OSX.

https://autodesk.com/combustion

cheers

[Michael Zoppo]

What do you think is better , After Effects or Combustion?

[Sam Moulton]

keep in mind that design and creativity is more a part of a good production than the software used to create it. Given the talent and time plus a hand full of 3rd party plug-ins and a good motion tracker you can do create any image you can dream up in AE.

[Joseph W. bourke]

Both have their strengths. That said, here’s where I’m coming from: I’ve been a Combustion beta tester for both V1 and V2, and a Combustion user for both. As of about 3 years ago, our parent company standardized on After Effects, and I quickly got up to speed on AE, having to recreate many of the projects that I had previously done on Combustion. At the time, Combustion’s color correction, tracking, and keying completely blew AE out of the water. Now, knowing that AE CS3 is coming, I would expect some catching up on AE’s part, and some advances on the Combustion front. Combustion was always weak in terms of audio handling, although that may have changed with releases 3 and 4, which I’m not familiar with. After effects isn’t exactly an audio suite, but I can do at least five tracks of VO, SFX, and music without getting memory errors.

Once I got used to After Effects workflow, I found that there were many, many shortcuts that got my work done more quickly than Combustion, but that the interface was less than elegant, as Combustion’s is. Once you know one, you can pick up the other pretty quickly – how many ways are there to build a compositing package? AE’s color corrector is way behind Combustion’s of two releases ago. That’s because many of Combustion’s features were ported directly from Inferno, its high end cousin. Good luck with your choice. I think the integration Adobe is presenting with the CS3 Suite should play a major role in your choice – it’s pretty amazing how Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects will play together.

Joe Bourke
Art Director / WMUR-TV

[Jimmy Brunger]

I think you would struggle to buy *just* the Flame software aswell..I believe you need to buy it as a turnkey system, which is big bucks…Same with Smoke – Flame’s editing/finishing brother. The software for that is like

[Nicholas Toth]

Consider this.

You can buy AE, Combustion, Shake, and Digital Fusion for less than the cost of Flame. Throw in some high end Black Magic or Kona cards, new display monitors, and you’re still less than Flame.

If you purchase all of them, you’re pretty set around the board. (then drop a grand on tutorials…) I’m not a combustion user, but the closeness between shake and df is SO rediculously close. Df just has a particle system and can import 3d objects/fbx files. They only have a handful of differences when it comes to workflow. Nodal is Nodal, you just have to learn to roll with the punches of different interface terms for certain effects.

If you’re hellbent on purchasing a high end Discreet product, you may want to check out Toxik. Its pricey, and you need own a membership annually, but it allegedly is the budget version of flame/smoke made for a system like yours.

Most importantly don’t forget its about the quality of the final product.
Its about the artist, not the box or the software he/she works on.

Nicholas Toth
Freelance Animator
nicholastoth.com

[Martti Ekstrand]

Well if you aim for a career in VFX get both and Shake as well (it’s dirt cheap now) and learn to use them all. None is ‘better’ than the other – different tasks to be done, different tools needed. The more flexible you are the better chances you’ll have doing good work and getting ahead in a really competitive field. And never forget to have fun!

[Jimmy Brunger]

New VERY cheap per-point feathering solution directly in AE just released: https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=105&postid=857647

*Production Studio Premium / *Combustion 3
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