[Philo Calhoun]

Also, Xpress is much more finicky about video and audio cards than PPro.

[Philo Calhoun]

I use both Premiere Pro and Avid XPress. The metaphors used are quite different, so there is a learning curve going from one to the other. In the end, the output won’t look any different between them.

I’ve found the current versions of each to be about equally stable, but if XPress crashes, it is easier to recover your project than when PPro crashes. As a NLE detached from other programs, Avid is a little easier to use – once one has gotten past the learning curve. However, even though it is more expensive, it has less “features” than PPro. It can’t handle vector images. The pan and zoom feature is worse than PPro’s scaling. There are less effects. Xpress doesn’t really like avi files (and can’t create as large ones as PPro). If you get Xpress – get use to QT reference files. Although Avid owns Xpress, ProTools, and XSI – I’ve found they are not particularly well integrated. In fact, downloading the most recent version of Xpress messed up ProTools and I had to reinstall ProTools.

If you think you might do special effects, audio editing, chromakey work, and DVD authoring – the Adobe Video Suite is a much better deal. If you are doing strictly NLE editing and plan to hand your project off to a big studio or if you have thousands of files and need the better media management – Xpress is a better choice. I find Xpress slows down less than PPro for long movies. In the end, each is just a tool and you can make a great movie with either.

[Philo Calhoun]

Mylenium:
Tthank you for your comments. I guess I should go back a step and ask your opinion for the general method of modeling. What I want to accomplish is similar to https://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/327833

If you look at the small intestine and large intestine, how would you model these in C4D? The ways I can think of would be:
1. start with a sweep nurb and then make it editable and play with ring edge selections for scale, rotation, etc.
2. start with a small part and make a series of extrudes and play with scale, rotation, etc.
3. make a linear model of the small and large intestine and add a FFD deformer
4. make a linear model of the small and large intestine and add a series of deformers
5. make a linear model of the small and large intestine and add a skeleton and manipulate the bones. At this point I am leaning towards this, but I would appreciate any suggestions you might have. Thank you.

[Philo Calhoun]

I would recommend purchasing InterPoser Pro and importing models from http://www.daz3d.com.

[Philo Calhoun]

Thank you for the followup. XSI’s lattice deformation tool is much easier for me to use than C4D’s FFD deformer. XSI is fairly nonintuitive on many things (materials, cloth, an overcomplex render tree, etc.) and less stable than C4D, but its tools are more useful to me. In XSI, the lattice deformer, extrude along spline, ability to lathe along non axis lines, the ability for lathe and extrude to work on polygons without nurb objects, and several other features are much more powerful than C4D’s equivalent tools. In XSI one doesn’t need to select points in a particular order to avoid clicking near the arrows. I’m hoping one day that the best of each program gets combined into one powerful and easy to use application.

I tried adding more x and y points to the ffd in C4D but it wasn’t precise enough for my needs.

[Philo Calhoun]

I recently started using C4D after XSI, because for many projects it is faster to use. I don’t have experience with Maya (other than the PLE). There are some annoyances in C4D that require workarounds (no real extrude along spline, lathe only works in one axis, very annoying axis tools that make precise placement of points on a spline a two step process, no real nurbs, etc.). But C4D is generally quite stable, very intuitive, and has very good addins (like the sketch and toon and hair modeles and MOGRAPH – which I am just starting to learn). I’ve done comparison renders from C4D and XSI (which uses mental ray, like Maya). These comparisons were harder to set up than I expected, because modeling is done a bit differently and trying to export a model from XSI to C4D or vice versa is somewhat problematic. At least so far as I have been able to test, the renders if properly tweaked are virtually identical for most scenes. Add depth of field or motion blur and C4D’s rendering shows its deficiencies, but that doesn’t mean overall one cannot render as good an image as with mental ray.

[Philo Calhoun]

I tried the EAS plugin and it is very primitive compared to XSI’s extrude (that allows you to rotate, globally scale, scale relative to one axis, and most importantly – set UVs). Does the MOGRAPH plugin have more extrude options?

[Philo Calhoun]

If you have Larry Mitchell’s Cinema 4D R 9.5 Essential Training DVD, it has a good section on applying materials to different selections and was a big help for me in the transition from XSI to C4D. I highly recommend it.

[Philo Calhoun]

Thank you for the suggestions. I’ll try the free plugin and see if it works in C4D R10. The other two addins look interested and I keep hearing about MOGRAPH, but my needs are complex modeling and simple animations – which it doesn’t seem is really what MOGRAPH is for. I like the interface of C4D and the ability to import DAZ models (via InterPoser Pro), but miss some of the modeling features of XSI (extrude along curve, rotate around curve, better use of mouse buttons for modeling and cameras, etc). For something like creating a human skeleton, I’m still much faster in XSI. (The extrude along curve function gets used 24 times for this.)

[Philo Calhoun]

… I meant as opposed to sweep nurb.