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Hate and Love
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I have amen interest in trying out Hit Film, looks like the team is making serious progress. It is priced about right and with OFX support it might be an alternative to Motion. I don’t see it competing with After Effects at the moment but that might change.
I would love to use Nuke Studio but it is expensive. Impressive software it is. Perhaps there could be something like that with Fusion and Resolve though it is not really a serious editor just yet. A few improvements with playback would help. As far as touching up a single shot, Fusion is really awesome!
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[David Lawrence] “Absolutely. I think that’s why we see various different data models and UI approaches to working with time-based media.”
In addition, there’s a also a mindset difference. Editors and compositors think differently and the UIs are tailored accordingly. Some are good at both, but that’s usually not the case. Just like “offline” (or film or creative) editors think differently than “online” (or finishing) editors.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Isn’t one of the core differences between an editing app and a compositing app the way in which media playback is handled? In general, a compositor is designed to move frame-based media into an uncompressed RGB 4:4:4 progressive buffer, regardless of the original codec. This is difficult to do in real-time. OTOH, an NLE is designed to deal with movie streams, usually in a native or compatible codec. An NLE is often dependent on an underlying media engine to handle part of the actual movie file playback, a la QT and FCP7. As a result, real-time playback is easier, but compositing might not be quite as good.”
This certainly was true, but now Premiere and FCPX have real-time, 32-bit floating point pipelines, and After Effects has a persistent disk cache. The lines here are blurring.
I think that now the larger technical difference is that current-gen NLEs have simpler rendering pipelines, and that NLE design generally prefers to skip frames in order to maintain real-time playback, while compositor design prefers to slow playback in order to show every frame.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “think that now the larger technical difference is that current-gen NLEs have simpler rendering pipelines, and that NLE design generally prefers to skip frames in order to maintain real-time playback, while compositor design prefers to slow playback in order to show every frame.”
NLEs are leaning more heavily on GPU power to achieve on-the-fly and even rendered compositing than do compositors. The objective being real-time playback with effects. Often with inferior visual results.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “NLEs are leaning more heavily on GPU power to achieve on-the-fly and even rendered compositing than do compositors. The objective being real-time playback with effects. Often with inferior visual results.”
Some compositors lean heavily on the GPU, too.
Let’s talk about “inferior visual results.” What do you have in mind?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “Let’s talk about “inferior visual results.” What do you have in mind?”
I have yet to see a dissolve on a GPU-based system that seems to look right to me. FCPX is the worst offender.
I also noticed this next issue after the latest update of Premiere Pro CC. Graphics with glows and transparencies changed in appearance for the worse when the “composite in linear space” is enabled in the sequence settings. This used to match the way it looked in AE. Now these same graphics don’t. Lately I’ve been leaving it unchecked.
These two issues might not be completely GPU-based, but it sure seems like it.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Qualify “look right”
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[Oliver Peters] “I have yet to see a dissolve on a GPU-based system that seems to look right to me. FCPX is the worst offender.”
That’s funny; a dissolve is just “over” — it’s the simplest compositing calculation there is! There’s really no way to simplify a dissolve calculation for the sake of rendering it faster, so whether it’s computed on the CPU or the GPU can’t make a difference.
What does make a difference is whether the over operation in the dissolve is calculated in film-style (linear light) or video-style (gamma-encoded). The emergence of linear light compositing in NLEs is a advancement in their compositing capabilities, and is coincidental with GPU acceleration.
FCPX has like a dozen different cross-dissolve options. Which one(s) don’t you like?
[Oliver Peters] “I also noticed this next issue after the latest update of Premiere Pro CC. Graphics with glows and transparencies changed in appearance for the worse when the “composite in linear space” is enabled in the sequence settings. This used to match the way it looked in AE. Now these same graphics don’t. Lately I’ve been leaving it unchecked.”
Compositing in linear space* more closely models the way light really works, and generally leads to easier realistic compositing — but it calculates differently, which means it looks different and “feels” different (in that the same numeric controls do different things with and without gamma encoding).
Adobe made a mess of this between Ae and Pr over the last couple years. Ae does not composite linearly by default; you have to dig into the project settings and tell it to. Pr is even more confusing. It composited in a gamma-encoded space by default in software only mode, and in a linear space with hardware acceleration. They “helpfully” provided checkboxes to override either behavior, instead of one simple control that tells you exactly what the renderer is doing, no matter whether the render is hardware-accelerated or not. I’ll have to look and see what the current version is actually doing by default to understand what you’re seeing better.
[Oliver Peters] “These two issues might not be completely GPU-based, but it sure seems like it.”
As I mentioned above, it is coincidental. For example, Nuke is largely CPU-driven but always work in linear space. Flame is largely GPU-driven, but also largely works in a video-style, gamma-encoded space.
* Linear is a really loaded term. There’s scene-linear and display-linear; neither of these employ gamma-encoding, but one is relative to the light present when the camera captured and one is relative to the display that will show the work. Scene-linear is always high dynamic range and must be tone-mapped; display-linear has generally been tone-mapped and assumes certain viewing conditions. Then there’s what’s sometimes called linear, as in not-log, which is gamma-encoded and totally non-linear.
I am not a color scientist, but I play one on the Internet.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Qualify “look right””
Oh my goodness, your post is 125x more efficient in word-count than mine was.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Bret Williams] “No love for hitfilm round here I guess. I haven’t played with the latest, but isn’t it trying to do everything?”
Yes, it is. And it features some cool things Ae doesn’t have, like an integrated 3D space.
I haven’t used it, but it looks like Hitfilm has separate compositing and editorial “rooms.”
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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