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FCPX and Fusion
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[David Mathis] ” Not sure whether to call it a child parent relationship as in After Effects but very interesting.”
This is different from parenting… a node stack is a chain of nodes. Sometimes, people just call it “the stack”. ☺
Shawn
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I do like the instances feature which was what I was inquiring about but agree with what you said. So many cool things about Fusion.
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[Brett Sherman] “Clones are duplicates of anything. Which doesn’t really translate into AE other than multiple instances of the same Pre Comp.”
Yes. Clone layers in Motion are like wiring extra outputs off from a node in a nodal compositor — a way of saying “that layer that’s down there in the layer stack should ALSO contribute its output up here in the layer stack.”
What C4D calls “Cloners” are known in Motion as “Replicators.”
[Brett Sherman] “The short falling of Motion not having multiple Comps to me doesn’t have anything to do with Precomps. More that sometimes a project has more than one output and its better to keep it contained in one Project. I just can’t think of a way Group layers are not superior to Precomps.”
The advantage of a Group is that it’s not a separate, project-level container. The advantage of a precomp is that it IS a separate, project-level container. One gives you direct access to its contents, the other gives you clean re-use. I think they both have significant strengths and weaknesses in different situations.
[Brett Sherman] “Precomp lives outside your composition and layers within it can’t interact with elements in the composition, such as masking layers. And, of course, you’re always flying blind with a Precomp. No way to see how changes affect the final Comp. “
The latest release of After Effects includes a massive new feature that will totally change the way people work in Ae, once people start discovering it: master properties. You can expose some properties inside of a precomp as external properties when it’s used as a layer in other comps. Essentially, you can now instance and rig comps inside of Ae:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/creating-motion-graphics-templates.html#main-pars_header_1586269523Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Simon Ubsdell] “But this is where we really need Walter to illuminate the bigger picture and we don’t have him any more.”
Flattery will get you nowhere. I’m still here, so you have to hang around, too!
[Simon Ubsdell] “I come back to the point that I don’t think that there’s a fundamental conceptual difference between the two models, except that exclusively layer-based solutions have intrinsically fewer options … rather than the other way around, which is how I think most people think of it.”
I think that nodal compositors represent very directly the way that they work under-the-hood; layer-based compositors abstract away those detailed mechanics of compositing. This presents a trade-off: operational speed and simplicity in many common compositing tasks, for flexibility and power.
(Please note that there’s a crossover point in project complexity where a layer-based system’s relative lack of flexibility and power actually flips the equation, and also costs you operational speed and simplicity!)
So I might have to agree with Simon. Layer-based compositors DO seem to have fewer options. They tend to lock you into fixed render pipelines while nodal compositors software leave that pipeline entirely to the operator’s discretion. They tend to make media/mask/matte reuse difficult. They tend to make monitoring context throughout the comp difficult. That can be a lot to give away for an interactive 2D representation of compositing order versus time.
To Simon’s other point, though, I wonder how many of these problems are truly intrinsic to layered compositing, and how many are just bad UX.
Mistika has a really interesting feature that allows the operator to toggle comps back and forth freely between a layer view and a node view. It’s the same comp, the same tools, the same results… just different representations of that same setup to make different manipulations easier.
(It’s also worth mentioning that Mistika’s timeline implementation is unique: they refer to their timeline as a three-dimensional “timespace.” And while we’re off this topic and on that one, Mistika also has a feature called Graffiti that lets you draw notes on your timeline, which Alan Bell might appreciate.)
[Simon Ubsdell] “To me the real difference still lies in the fact that After Effects is geared more towards motion graphics and Fusion/Nuke are dedicated compositing solutions. The node/layer distinction is a relatively trivial difference by comparison. I would add that transforming Fusion into a more motion graphics-friendly offering would be a much simpler proposition than converting After Effects to a compositor that could genuinely compete with its node-based rivals.”
I’d be really interested in exploring this more. If not layers, what is it you’d say makes Ae so well suited for motion graphics and so poorly suited for compositing?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] The advantage of a precomp is that it IS a separate, project-level container.
To me that’s not an advantage of a Precomp, but rather an advantage of being able to have multiple Compositions within a Project, which everyone admits is a weakness with Motion. In Motion, you can solo a Group Layer and set your view to an orthogonal view which is basically the same as working with an isolated Precomp in AE. Or you can edit it in context of everything else in the Composition. AE works only in one way.
[Walter Soyka] The latest release of After Effects includes a massive new feature that will totally change the way people work in Ae, once people start discovering it: master properties. You can expose some properties inside of a precomp as external properties when it’s used as a layer in other comps. Essentially, you can now instance and rig comps inside of Ae:
Interesting. This is a powerful feature. If a bit time-consuming to set up. For repeated uses this is great.
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[Brett Sherman] “To me that’s not an advantage of a Precomp, but rather an advantage of being able to have multiple Compositions within a Project, which everyone admits is a weakness with Motion. In Motion, you can solo a Group Layer and set your view to an orthogonal view which is basically the same as working with an isolated Precomp in AE. Or you can edit it in context of everything else in the Composition. AE works only in one way.”
Maybe we’re saying the same thing, then?
With only a single composition in Motion, there is no need at all for precomps. However, since Ae can have as many comps in a project as you like, a precomp becomes a valuable organizational tool: a way to cleanly reuse and update a common element across as many other comps as you wish.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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