Now You Con Duit
Tuesday, December 19, 2006 at 2:52PM Pauli Ojala, one of the masterminds behind Conduit, has a blog where he demonstrates the power of the plug-in's nodal niftiness.
Conduit is awesome, but personally I have no use for it in FCP or Motion. Maybe someday it will be an After Effects plug-in, and then I will be (in Dieter voice) as happy as a little girl.
I am so tired of people saying that nodal interfaces are "high-end" or obtuse or anti-art or whatever (is anyone actually saying that? Or does it just float around as a sourceless wrong-headed notion?). It takes a lot more esoteric knowledge and wetware wear to work effectively in After Effects than it does in a nodal application, unless you're doing interesting things with time. Conduit provides a fun and punishment-free environment to experiment with nodal compositing. Try it!
Reader Comments (4)
I agree 200% about your words on nodal compositing, Stu. As much as I love After Effects--having used it for motion gfx and compositing ever since v3.1--when I forced myself to use/learn Shake for a project last year, it didn't take long for me to formally "break up" with AE as my main compositing app. Sure, like an "F.T.F", I still keep AE around for some compositing tasks, but my bread and butter stuff now goes to Shake first.
There's a reason why all high end compositing apps use nodal interfaces. It's simply faster and easier to manage all the elements required to complete complex shots using a nodal architecture than it is with a linear, stacked timeline UI.
In retrospect, I can't believe that I tortured myself for so many years using the timeline paradigm. It's truly painful to use AE now for anything other than motiongraphics work.
Wow - what a fascinating blog! Thanks for the link, Stu. I bought Conduit on sight a few weeks ago for use in Motion and FCP (still trying to get it to work with FCP, though). It was so fast and powerful, I was blown away. I have a lot to learn about it (and nodal compositing) before I can really make it work for me, though.
I still use AE for a lot of "power" projects. I find myself using Motion as a tool for quick or simple jobs, and sometimes to prep footage/composites for other AE comps (such as textures/fx generated by Motion's particle engine, which are pretty good & fast).
Motion certainly has limitations when projects get complex, though. I'm hoping that Conduit, with it's multiple-operations-in-one-pass approach, can simplify things further.
I think melodrama that the point he was trying to make is just the opposite - that neither approach / software package is intrinsically better than the other. Why is a nodal interace more high end than a keyframe interface? As a user of both Shake and AE, I would say that they each have their place.
I am a recent convert to nodal compositing and after working on Shake for a year I cannot imagine how I managed without it before. Even though EOLed at its current price everyone should own it.
I am hoping that Apple's Shake replacement (if it really does exist) has all the power of Shake but the real-time goodness of Motion. But I hope Motion doesn't become the Shake replacement that some are fearing i.e going more mass market.
If you are interested in nodal compositing then Conduit is a pretty good way to get started at minimal cost. You'll love it in no time!