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on the PPro product manager popping his head around the door to give a heads up.
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Yeah and when you watch Andrew Kramer vids and how much you can do with all of those bundles plugins when you know what you’re doing it’s pretty f’ing impressive. I did a few pretty serious comps this last year and found myself using Nuke and AE as they both shine in areas where the other doesn’t. But if I could only have one program it would certainly be AE.
But yeah the mask feathering thing and also the ability to rotate and scale a mask like in Nuke would be awesome and really should be there.
Also I know a lot of people who’ve never touched Mocha. That program nails impossible tracks and is yet another freebie in the set. Blows the doors off Nuke’s planar tracker.
Robert Brown
Editor/VFX/Colorist – FCP, Smoke, Quantel Pablo, After Effects, 3DS MAX, Premiere Prohttps://vimeo.com/user3987510/videos
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[Alan Okey] “AE is good, but probably its main advantage is its ubiquity. In my opinion, AE still has a ways to go to catch up to the late Autodesk Combustion, at least in terms of its utility as a compositor.”
I owned and worked with a couple of different versions of Combustion. I thought the Keying and Color Correction were great, but man was it ever flakey.
I also seem to recall issues with the ever-fun non-integer frame rates. I think 23.98 or 23.976 was in question. (The recent Premiere Pro bug issue reminded me of that)
A node based compositor from Adobe or Apple has been an oft talked about holy grail. There were talks that a Softimage DS like Final Cut Studio was in-the-works. The rumor mill called it “Final Cut Extreme”. Then there was the rumor of a “Gentleman’s Agreement”. All hopes have since been dashed.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Realistically, editing is a verb – it has to encompass amazingly broad applications. FCP did that fantastically well.
The critics of FCPX are not the stodgy fuddy duddy’s, or the luddites: they comprise near precisely the entire body of creative editing raised on FCP.”
EXACTLY !! And thank you
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “It surely isn’t a functioning nodal compositor, and I know enough smoke guys (like dan!) who would simply state that a functioning compositor is a nodal compositor – by definition.”
(As Dan would probably agree!), just as “if you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t understand quantum physics”, so if you think you can composite in AE then you don’t know compositing.
Compositing isn’t about how many third party processes you can lay your hands on, it’s about how many processes you can quickly and easily build yourself.
Again, it’s like the difference between people who think keying is all about finding the ideal third party solution, whereas people who really know about keying understand it’s about building processes of which a third party keyer might only be a small part (or no part at all!).
I’d say that the biggest issue with AE is how clunky its design is in terms of building those compositing processes. Yes, you can build some amazing mograph processes as Andrew Kramer shows so brilliantly, but that’s something distinctly different.
I’d even go so far as to say that the much-maligned Motion has a much better architecture for compositing than AE – the “group” concept of layers gives you power that’s very cumbersome to replicate in AE.
Without a doubt, AE is untouchable as the king of mograph – it’s just not a real compositing tool. Yes, you can use it for compositing but then I can composite pretty well in iMovie (I mean the real one) if necessary 😉
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I have to say I was pretty impressed that David McGavran (John Adobe himself) took the time to log on to try to reproduce a problem I had while screwing around with outdated third-party software.
I’m expecting something huge from Adobe at NAB. It’s like being a kid on Christmas. I don’t think I’ve been this excited about something so nerdy since… well, since the weeks leading up to the release of FCPX…
Here’s hoping the bubble doesn’t burst the same way it did last June.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “so if you think you can composite in AE then you don’t know compositing.”
Uh tell that to Mark Christiansen I think he did a lot of “The Day After” in AE and numerous other things. I don’t think that’s a fair statement at all. AE is a tool that does many many things with excellent results. If it comes up short use another tool.
And Motion is better for compositing than AE? Really? Motion to me is one of the most frustrating and poorly designed programs I’ve ever used.
I mean what is “compositing”? Basically somebody gives you a shot to do and it’s up to you to figure out which tool is the most efficient one to do it with, or maybe it’s many tools. Cumbersome for one person makes total sense for someone else.
Robert Brown
Editor/VFX/Colorist – FCP, Smoke, Quantel Pablo, After Effects, 3DS MAX, Premiere Prohttps://vimeo.com/user3987510/videos
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[Scott Thomas] “I owned and worked with a couple of different versions of Combustion. I thought the Keying and Color Correction were great, but man was it ever flakey.”
Out of curiosity, were you running the Mac or Windows version? I’ve heard many say that the Mac version was never quite as stable or as fast as the Windows version. Windows users also got Backburner, which Mac users never got.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] ” it, is a goldfish in the sahara.”
Nice line.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Scott Thomas] “A node based compositor from … Apple has been an oft talked about holy grail.”
Yes, it was called Shake
It was created by a company called Nothing Real, and then Apple bought Nothing Real, dropped the price by 10x so anyone could afford it, and then mercilessly killed the product. How amazingly productive.
IMHO Apple is not interested in Pro’s … at least not when they don’t need us anymore.
Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA -
of course, I’m totally agreeing with you here – me is the mograph-ish guy.
I wouldn’t know real compositing from a hole in the ground – when I quoted Dan, its on a topic I take his word on!
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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