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weird shoes, FCPX, and the sheep barn.
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[Shawn Miller] “I would be really interested to what you’re working on, Jeremy. Is it going to be public at some point?”
Yes. I know it will be in certain stores for the public, I am unsure of a web presence at this point, but how can something not have a web presence these days? 🙂
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow] “[Shawn Miller] “I would be really interested to what you’re working on, Jeremy. Is it going to be public at some point?”
Yes. I know it will be in certain stores for the public, I am unsure of a web presence at this point, but how can something not have a web presence these days? :)”
Very true, I hope you’ll let us know if it hits The Interwebs. 🙂
Just out of curiosity, is there a reason you’re not using Mocha for roto and tracking?
Shawn
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[Jeremy Garchow] “In Ae, if I need to adjust levels and composite mode, it’s in two (or more) different places, in FCPX, it’s in the same place on the screen.”
Fair.
But the flip side of condensing all this stuff into the same place is that it’s harder to have immediate access to more of it at the same time.
On blend modes, I actually quite like being able to look over the layer stack and see how a set of things are interacting. I wouldn’t want to have to step into each layer to find that.
Again, ideally, we could have both.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Yes, it’s a bit of a conundrum. I like what FCPX is doing, and I can get to color, compositing effects, audio, special fx, metadata, almost any parameter I need to do adjust on a clip in the inspector by hitting command-4 to open it, and command-4 to close it. I don’t think Ae has this kind of functionality without a whole lot of setup and even then, I don’t think it could ever be as streamlined as X in it’s current state.”
I think these are different by design — some things that FCP X considers intrinsic properties are handled by effects in Ae.
FCP X, being an NLE, has a broader concept of what properties should be intrinsic, which is cool as long as you’re ok with the restrictions it imposes. While I see why it’d be handy for you in this workflow, compositors and mograph artists would chafe.
Let’s say you wanted color correction to be an intrinsic property of a layer in Ae. Which color correction effect should get hard-coded into the render pipeline?
This is why I mentioned generic filterable inspector panels (for which I have not yet filed a feature request — gotta go write that next). It’d be cool to have a panel that would only show effects for the currently selected layer matching “Levels OR Exposure OR Colorista II”. Would that help you in this situation?
[Jeremy Garchow] “It’s hard for me to grasp what is happening when I make a pre comp a 3D layer because I want to light it or match a camera move, and then collapse the transformation (because I need to for quality purposes or whatever) and things go askew.”
That’s hard for everyone to grasp. I’m working on a script to make it easier.
[Jeremy Garchow] “And that’s really all I could hope for. Ae shouldn’t change too much, it’s a stalwart, but the little things you do repetitively every day (like make a precomp to layer boundaries) make things go much faster, especially for the “ok” users like me.”
A lot of this “do stuff faster” work is handled nicely by third party developers.
The best advice I can give you is to go on a shopping spree on Aescripts.com. Start with ft-toolbar which lets you easily create buttons for scripts, effects, etc. and go from there.
For example, Trim to Layer [link] will solve one of your earlier problems.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Shawn Miller] “Just out of curiosity, is there a reason you’re not using Mocha for roto and tracking?”
Honestly, every time I do a bigger composting job like this, I try to get to know Mocha and then subsequently get weirded out.
I have used Ae for so long in this capacity, that I know what to expect, and to Adobe’s credit, their own proprietary tools get better and better
tl;dr…I’m lazy.
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[Shawn Miller] “Just out of curiosity, is there a reason you’re not using Mocha for roto and tracking?”
Or, for that matter, Motion?
I know you’re a long-time Ae user, but maybe you’d find the inspectorful interface more to your liking?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “Or, for that matter, Motion?
I know you’re a long-time Ae user, but maybe you’d find the inspectorful interface more to your liking?
“Because it’s easier to get a layered (stacked) edit in to Ae than it is to get the same timeline in to Motion.
🙁
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I’m going to annoy you all here and just mention that a lot of this is much better handled by the Motion model where it’s ridiculously easy to get to everything all of the time.
And I’ll admit that Motion doesn’t allow for quite the same degree of complexity as Ae, but quite clearly allows for vastly more complexity than FCP X.
And then having lit the blue touch paper, I shall retire promptly.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “every time I do a bigger composting job like this” (emphasis mine)
I know you’re not happy with the Ae interface, but it’s not THAT bad!
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Jeremy Garchow] “[Shawn Miller] “Just out of curiosity, is there a reason you’re not using Mocha for roto and tracking?”
Honestly, every time I do a bigger composting job like this, I try to get to know Mocha and then subsequently get weirded out.
I have used Ae for so long in this capacity, that I know what to expect, and to Adobe’s credit, their own proprietary tools get better and better
tl;dr…I’m lazy.”
Ha ha, yeah, I have a suspicion that Mocha could make your life much easier… but totally understand if you just don’t have a week or two to invest in learning it. Maybe Slice-X could be helpful here?
Shawn
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Let’s put FCPX away for a second (Aindreas will be happy about that) and ask ourselves can the Ae/Pr interface be more efficient? I think we could all agree on “yes”. While the panels let you customize to your hearts content, how much of that customization is wasted space?”
I couldn’t agree more – everything about the Ae UI screams to me of legacy architecture that could so obviously be done differently. No-one in their right minds would build the UI that way if they were starting today. But it kind of works and does present a lot, and I do mean a lot, of really dense functionality reasonably effectively.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Bring FCPX back out again (sorry Aindreas), and using the color board as an example, I can open the color board (command-6), choose exposure (command-control-e), page up and down to the pucks, and use arrows to adjust the pucks. I then go to color (command-control-c), bounce to the puck I want, and go. Command-4 zips all that back up. All of this is without selecting anything, or constructing a new panel diagram to bounce between.”
We’ll have to agree to disagree on that. To me, to notion of tabbing to a different panel to adjust the saturation because I’ve just tweaked the gamma really goes against the grain and it’s something you just don’t have to put up with in any other grading environment. Grading is surely all about the interaction between the different controls, and not a process where you first adjust one thing then go off and adjust another. At least, most colorists will tell you that – which is one of the main reasons for using a physical interface that allows you to simultaneously makes adjustments to two different parameters, rather than have to do it serially.
Grading with a mouse is bad enough, but adding to the serial nature of the process by having to tab around as the Color Board requires you to do really seems to me to be pushing things in the wrong direction.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t work, but from a UI point of view there is surely no question that it is sub-optimal.
[Jeremy Garchow] “X’s method is far form perfect, but there is an efficiency to it that I appreciate, and the keyboard customization interface, in my personal opinion, is pretty sublime.”
Sublime is quite a claim 😉 There are still a few things that I’d like to have shortcuts for that don’t seem to be there, or maybe I haven’t worked the shortcuts hard enough?
I think overall that Apple have, as is their wont, put a good deal of good thought into the UI design of X, but I just think there are limitations, which as far as they are concerned fall into the category of “good enough” that they currently seem a little too prone to embracing.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com
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