Hopefully if nothing else this AE Maxon collaboration might prod them into realising just what a great thing they had and forgot..
________________________________ From: Dan Yargici [[email protected]] Sent: 07 April 2013 01:47 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: This is what I meant by AE integration Yes, it is - and this is coming from one of it's biggest evangelists! There are still cases where it's integration provides great opportunities unachievable outside the package, but those aside, it pretty much dead in the water... :/ DAN On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 2:41 PM, olivier jeannel <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Correct me if I'm wrong, but nobody mentionned the Fx Tree. Is it completly out-dated ? Le 07/04/2013 12:03, [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> a écrit : Compositing comes in many flavors – and what to use will depend on your preferences and needs. The main aspect is how nodal it is. On one hand of the spectrum you have “hardly or not at all” and that is where AE and Combustion (remember me?) sit. Easy to get into for those who come to graphics from an Adobe point of view – but not something to base a pipeline around. In my opinion, if it’s not nodal it’s not a compositor – but rather a mucking-about-with-images software – but granted, people can get some very nice artistic work out of them – that would be hard to do in a nodal compositor. As mentioned Smoke and DS offer a nice hybrid – where you can organize effects in a timeline or a nodal tree or both. Easy to get into but they offer a lot of depth. They offer something quite unique in the way they can handle a complete project, editing and effects combined. Then there are the purely nodal compositors. A nodal tree can look intimidating to people at first (although coming from a 3D background it really shouldn’t) – but it’s the very mechanism that allows to manage complex work. You could in turn categorize them by the complexity of the nodes. Shake would be a lot of very simple, low level nodes - in the extreme: one node does one specific operation. Fusion would be much higher level nodes - a single node can be almost a software in itself. Nuke sits somewhere in the middle – and I think that’s part of it’s success: it adapts well to both preferences – while Shake users would have a hard time in Fusion and vise-versa. While any nodal compositor should be able to get the job done – I haven’t seen any that handled the amount of nodes in complex trees with such ease as Nuke does – and with high bit depth and resolution as well, while allowing the tree to remain human readable. Not the most elegant software perhaps – and it can be a bit unforgiving at times – but for compositing multilayered/multi-pass CG it just sits (or rather stands) in a class of its own. The Achilles heel of nodal trees is timeline and editing based effects. If you work on a shot by shot basis, such as for film work, it’s perfectly fine but managing a complete edit is messy at best. So, in my opinion again, the choice for which type of compositor to adapt is very much tied in with your approach to projects. Does it all happen at once in a single timeline (eg. commercials and video clips) or does each shot have to be assembled separately (film) before it goes into the master edit. There are grey areas, where VFX heavy commercials are better off in a film workflow and films that can be handled with a motion graphics and video clip approach. And for some kind of work you can just use an editing software and bypass compositing completely. Avoid choosing the wrong type of compositor for your workflow – just because it’s supposedly a good software or just because it’s available. After effects used for film/vfx compositing jumps to mind as well as Nuke for motion graphics – it can be done but at your own risk and peril. From: Jason S<mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, April 07, 2013 5:44 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: This is what I meant by AE integration Paul Griswold Personally for compositing I would always go with Fusion. Especially now that they have Generation AM out and they just released some great open source Python modules for pipeline building. I know Nuke is the big boy these days and I think Nuke and Fusion both have their strengths and weaknesses, but I just tend to feel like Fusion is a little more artist friendly and therefore faster for me to work with. I heard lots of good things about Fusion... what are it's main strengths (and weaknesses) you were reffering to in you opinion, or what do you like most? Also had an extra 'with' in my reply :) <.. timeline based [solutions] such as AE (with stacked effects) it's easier to have longer with compositions with a number of effects shots as single projects while keeping an overview and control of the whole. > cheers On 06/04/2013 7:31 PM, Jason S wrote: Node based workflows has the advantage of easily having the outputs of effect streams as sources very easily (visually), giving more space for complexity while remaning managable & understandable. Whereas timeline based such as AE (with stacked effects) it's easier to have longer with compositions with a number of effects shots as single projects while keeping an overview and control of the whole. Smoke (and DS) harness the best of both worlds. But as far a I know, both AE & Fusion are excellent. <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="width:100%;"> <tr> <td align="left" style="text-align:justify;"><font face="arial,sans-serif" size="1" color="#999999"><span style="font-size:11px;">This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. 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