Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Well, it certainly shows that if you want your interviewees to be in focus and you don’t want to blow your highlights and you want to avoid any number of really nasty artifacts, and you don’t want to have to grade everything B&W to cover up the colour problems, you’re certainly better off not trying to shoot on an iPhone.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
That’s tricky. So you’re just wanting to have an even spread?
What I’d do is the following:
Set the speed to Custom.
In the keyframe editor find the spot where the first caption changes to the second caption and set a keyframe.
Move the generator down the timeline far enough to account for the “missing” frames in the first caption.
Extend it back to the start (go to the start, hit “I” on the keyboard).
In the Keyframe editor, move the start keyframe back to zero.
That should take care of it, I think.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “Ha, but the joke is on you, as I will now be submitting Modo-inspired feature requests to the Ae team!”
Although of course who needs Ae when you have Nuke and the rest of the Foundry ecosystem to support Modo?
😉
[Walter Soyka] “I’m not sure I have the brainspace for all these 3D apps, but Modo is clearly worth a closer look.”
I know what you mean about brainspace – 3D is really not like other applications where you can comfortably master every available offering and still have room to think.
But yes, I’ve been a huge fan of Modo for a while now and 801 looks to have nailed so much more that it’s hard not to see it as a very major player at this point.
A lot of 3D artists use Modo for the modelling alone – and then move over to something else for finishing (though increasingly I think we’re going to see Modo used throughout the pipeline). It’s not unreasonable to argue that Modo’s modelling tools are best in class. Do check out Mesh Fusion – it’s astonishingly powerful:
https://community.thefoundry.co.uk/tv/training/view.aspx?id=732
And that’s only a small part of what’s an incredibly modelling powerful toolset.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “I’m watching some Modo videos now. You could have just said, “Walter, go look up ‘tool pipeline’ right this very second!””
Very glad to hear it. I thought it would probably be right up your street 🙂
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “Ae has to keep evolving and it needs to address its legacy architectural issues to stay relevant.”
I think it’s easy to underestimate just how much of a challenge this is. They have known for an eternity that their users want performance improvements but they just can’t seem to deliver them. Legacy architecture can easily become a millstone it’s impossible to shake off.
Which is why I’d love to see Aindreas’ built from scratch thing … Ae Modo-style.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
There does seem to be an issue that the Constant speed option doesn’t get the first caption length right.
Have you tried using the Custom speed mode which allows you to position where you want the changes to take place? Go into the Keyframe editor and set the appropriate keyframes for the changes to happen. Fairly easy to do and gives you just the right result.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
The Animation codec is no longer supported in Motion 5 (which is what Steven i using) so your only option for transparency is to use ProRes4444.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “But then Adobe went an introduced CINEWARE and improved EXR support. CINEWARE doesn’t solve my node/layers problem, and I was pretty well opposed to it at first as a waste of resources — but the ability to bounce camera/light/null data back and forth between the apps with a single click is really a big workflow improvement over the old one-way 3D-to-comp system.”
Yes, I’ll certainly buy that CINEWARE has got to be seriously useful for a lot of users. Personally, I feel even more strongly than you do and I abominate the notion of doing 3D compositing without nodes but that ease of use does have its attractions. Up to a certain level of complexity …
[Walter Soyka] “Is there anything in your mind that Modo does especially well? Unique strengths?”
I like it for its dissimilarity to C4D 😉 C4D seems to be engineered to “make things easy” whereas Modo is built to make processes incredibly deep. I’m not sure you can have easy and deep in the same package.
I’ve been checking out the new character animation features in 801 and there’s some seriously well thought out stuff in there:
In fact all of the new features are as always a really significant step forward – without trying to over-reach and under-deliver.
I think you’d really like how “scriptable” it all is.
What’s really great for me is how powerful the modelling toolset is and it keeps getting better – Mesh Fusion is a fantastic way to work for instance, combining the best of subdivision and booleans.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “Hey, I’ll talk about Modo!”
I hoped you’d rise to the bait.
Brad Peebler is indeed a great guy, but (clever and funny as he is as you can tell from his “modcasts”!) he’d be the first to admit that he’s not the real brains – there are some simply awesome talents behind it despite their Lightwave credentials. (Allen Hastings is astonishingly brilliant).
It was actually the fact that Brad and others at NewTek wanted to rebuild Lightwave from the ground up that led to them leaving when the management disagreed.
That’s what’s particularly interesting in terms of this discussion.
As for stability issues, I’ve done some massively big jobs in Modo without serious problems – I suspect that’s just nasty rumour-mongering. The transition to 64 bit in 501 was the most impressive such transition I’ve seen in any application – already extremely fast in 32 bit, it became massively faster. I’ve not seen that kind of speed bump anywhere before. They really take speed optimisation extremely seriously and always have done.
The renderer is one of the best-looking I’ve seen and the OpenGL preview rendering gives you really great real-time feedback which speeds things up no end.
Your point about interoperability is of course very much being taken care of now that they’re in the Foundry stable, but your insistence on Ae compatibility is sadly just one more nail in the coffin of Aindreas’ noble dream. You Ae people – Ae is the Sun around which everything else must revolve 😉
I haven’t used C4D much, but I would say that Modo feels like a much more serious offering in terms of its long term potential – they’ve built it slowly and deliberately from the ground up with an incredibly deep, powerful and well-thought out architecture that I don’t think C4D quite matches.
” In April 2005, the high-end visual effects studio Digital Domain integrated modo into their production pipeline. Other studios to adopt modo include Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, Zoic Studios, id Software, Eden FX, Studio ArtFX, The Embassy Visual Effects, Naked Sky Entertainment and Spinoff Studios.”
Although it doesn’t get talked about much by the casual 3D user, there’s no question that it’s started to penetrate deep into the upper echelons – and for very good reasons. And of course, it talks nicely with the rest of the 3D world.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “there definitely is space for a focused mograph thought leader application dedicated to brand mograph video execution as long as it operates transformatively at near realtime for them, with a suite of truly excellent design tools and has a sticker price between say 350- 550 as shawn posits.”
I don’t at all disagree that there’s a potential for such a product – there’s always room for competition and Adobe sure do need some at this point. In fact, I’d like to see a raft of Ae competitors springing up – it could only be good for everybody.
But I seriously doubt anyone could develop and market such a competitor for the kind of money you’re talking about – much more like $1000, I would say, which I think was Shawn’s suggestion too.
I think it’s easy to underestimate how much work would need to go into it – it’s not like building an NLE, which is frankly very small beer by comparison.
It’s much more like building a 3D product. In fact, it would be very much like what happened with Modo, an outstanding 3D package that I keep mentioning here but which seems to have no penetration with the contributors to this forum, a fact that seems germane to this discussion.
So outstanding in fact, that there’s a notorious and slightly desperate Autodesk white paper that sets out for its sales team the arguments to use to explain why Maya has the edge over Modo – and this is a few years ago now.
Modo has hit version 801 this week and it’s a very exciting offering indeed with signs that character animation has finally arrived at a pretty fully-fledged state.
I got on board at the end of 301 in 2009 and at that point it was a real leap of faith to believe that it would develop to where it is today.
What Luxology decided to do from the outset is precisely what you’re suggesting should happen here – build it for speed and leanness and modernity with a very clear professional target market; keep up a steady upgrade pattern (essentially annual these days); only introduce features when they were good and ready and absolutely not try and hit all the targets from the outset.
Modo has succeeded, despite competing in a relatively crowded market, by being incredibly focussed, building a great user community, and most of all by creating an exceptionally good product.
But there are still things that it doesn’t have that drive me crazy and send me back to the old dinosaurs occasionally.
Suffice it to say, that my commitment to Modo hasn’t been cheap in the long run, even with a starting price of around $900 (I seem to remember). All the upgrades are paid for and cumulatively that’s a lot of money, even if the initial entry point was lower than everything except Lightwave.
Not sure what the point of this is, except to say that it’s taken a long time – in industry years – to get it to where it’s starting to achieve feature parity with the major players.
Do we think that the Ae community, much more dyed-in-the wool and unwilling to investigate alternative options to the Adobe monopoly offering, would embrace a new product in the same way, and in sufficient numbers, and have the patience to see it build slowly over a number of years?
In 3D there has always been a range of credible offerings and 3D artists are very used to jumping from one product to another – very few stake undying allegiance to one product or another if they have any sense at all.
The exact opposite is true of the Ae community who are more defined by their tool of choice than by what they actually do. That is the problem to overcome, I think. Not insoluble, but a very hard nut to crack.
Why would Ae users leave behind their comfort zone where everything is to hand and everything is made easy, for an offering that initially gave them much, much less? Aside from what Ae actually is in and of itself, think of the scripts and plug-ins and vast support resources …
And yes, Walter is right – you keep asking for Motion you just don’t realise it 😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com