Mythbusting 1 2 3
Saturday, May 5, 2007 at 12:14PM Mark Christiansen, author of Adobe After Effects 7 Studio Techniques, has complete the third installment of a series of articles about the state of compositing software for visual effects, and how Adobe After Effects fits into the picture.
I agree with Mark central thesis that AE's weak spots are responsiveness under heavy loads and "pre-composing," although on the latter it's not so much that pre-comping (nesting one layered comp into another) is the problem, but rather that once you do, you've lost any ability to visually navigate your project. As I've mentioned before (wow, way back in 2004!), it's the project itself, not the layered comp, that is the workspace of After Effects, and its long past unconscionable that there's no decent way to navigate it.
The Orphanage has been running shots with Fusion and NUKE for a while new, having the possibly unique history of never once running a shot through Shake. Simultaneously, we currently have a large show using After Effects. It's fascinating to watch compositors seated in the same room work in two such different applications as NUKE and After Effects. While each has its strengths and weaknesses, as Mark adroitly summarized in part two, one colossal advantage of NUKE's nodal system over AE is navigability. Sitting over an AE comper's shoulder, I watch them search and hunt desperately for "where" they did a certain bit of compositing. A comper is a visual person, and yet they are forced to scour endless alphabetically-sorted lists or arbitrary expanses of tabbed panes to find a comp they pray they've named distinctively. If they ever dared open the Flowchart View, they'd likely find that AE had trashed whatever organization they'd attempted to create there.
Meanwhile, the NUKE comper navigates to the "place" in their node tree where they did a particular bit of work with two flicks of the mouse. In the same way that you can reach for a familiar book off your shelf without needing to read the title—the general location, the color of the spine, or even the fact that you've left it sticking out slightly are more than enough visual cues to identify it—the nodal comper creates a distinct visual landscape that they know like the back of their hand. Doing a bunch of procsessing on just the background? Lump those nodes over yonder. Got a cool light-wrap trick you like? The nodes that make up that technique take on a certain shape that you'll recognize at a distance and remember months later.
Looking back at my 2004 article I seemed almost apologetic about wishing for more of a nodal interface to After Effects. That hesitancy is now completely gone. AE's only leg up on Motion is that it can handle much more complex compositing. In order to maintain this important differentiation, AE needs to stop punishing its users for creating the very type of project that makes AE worth using—one that contains many nested precomps.
That's right, pre-composing is anything but evil—it's the key to AE's power. But AE will remain in this weird limbo between the high- and low-end until it gives us an interface that lets us visualize and navigate these nested comps.
Mythbusting (Part One)
Mythbusting (Part Two)
Mythbusting (Part Three)
fxguide podcast featuring Mark in a roundtable discussion of comping apps at NAB
Reader Comments (21)
Lets not get started on masking tools and the interface feedback related to using them. Having to place a crummy 6 point mask and getting to the end and watch as AE slowly places the second point down and slowly carries on while you wait is ridiculous.
Jumping on to another system with flame almost made me weep when the operator casually drew around his image and it was all totally responsive.
No argument from me on that one Dale. The fact that AE actually re-renders the image each time you create a mask CV, often reducing the resolution as it does so, is infuriating.
Why not just go with Nuke 100% then stu - it has been 3 years (with 3 more likely before there is a change)
It's not all roses and ponies on the NUKE side either. There's a horses-for-courses logic emerging, and I'm sure as it develops I'll be blogging about it.
I think that AE users - so used to dealing with the impossible navigation and project management -after migrating to NUKE have the advantage of being able to innately deal with the "hidden multilayer-within-a node-stream" concept, not that The Foundry shouldn't work on making it more explicit. The "contact sheet" node is a good start!
Please keep lobbying Adobe for these changes you're writing about, because I feel like they are never going to happen and have really moved away from AE in the last 9 months, after having used it for, shit, 10 years. AE and NUKE would be a great combo for so many tasks though. How about getting the .vpe format into NUKE for example?
As a designer, i am from the photoshop-heavy world. The first thing i loved when working in Shake is the node UI. It was so much logical and althought it took more time to me to learn than AE, it was not that much different. And i found myself wondering why the hell, none (that i know of) is not working in a open-source node UI for a photoshop killer app.
Node UI is the way to work, and i use AE for 80% of time, but i wish i could have that option and not layers only way of working.
Three more advantages to a nodal interface:
(a) Other compositors can quickly reverse engineer a tree - quite literally starting at the fileout - and work it out. This means they can learn someone else's comp reasonably quickly.... and start working on it.
(b) Because you can reverse engineer trees, 2d supervisors/leads can more easily work with artists to diganose problematic comps...; and
(c) You can more easily break single large comps between multiple artists... and are able to easily bring their node trees back into the same master comp and reconnect it.
Hell, I'm a coord, not a compositor, and I've been able to open shake trees and work out what's going on if something needs to be fixed.
Artists also talk about how they can visualise their comps as node trees as they're working on shots. Not sure if AE guys get the same visual-ness..
And I tought I was the only one who has this "navigation"-problem. My last AE-project had around 1000 layers, put into 26 subcomps. I had to sit down and invent some way to keep track of my work...
I've worked in both types of vfx houses, nodal and AE, and I'm very thankful I learned the AE way first. If I had learned nodal first, I don't think I'd have had the patience to wrap my head around pre-comping. But now that I'm very familiar with both, I often find myself arranging my nodal flows to resemble "layers".
And to go back to AE's roto faults, all I want is variable edge feathering. I've discovered many ways to use tracking with masks, and don't usually have too much of a problem with the re-rendering of a frame after placing each CV (although it does occassionally crop up).
I really like the middle ground you get with Combustion.
Nodes? Check.
Timeline? Check.
Responsive interface/previews? Check.
AE still wins for motion graphics but even those can often be taken care of in combustion.
I would love to get into Shake, but can you really manage hundreds of what in AE would be layers and precomps in a nodes environment and not become completely lost?
Broadcast designers are constantly having to replicate for variations on a complex animation. I couldn't imagine how it could be organized with nodes?
I feel like alot of my navigational issues with After Effects could be solved with groups, or the ability to do folders of layers -- similiar to photoshop.
If I had folders inside the project, which I could apply effects to, or mask, or whatever, I don't think I'd ever pre-compose again.
you said only advantages of NUKE over AE, then why use AE in the orphanage?
what are the advantages of AE over nodal-based software?
I'm a AE user for about 2 years, first in motion graphics and now in vfx, and I'm pretty comfortable with this software.
I have often heard this in the VFX world; but how do you set up a workflow built on After Effects and C4D. What is a pipeline and what does it mean to set one up? Is it the folder structure or color management thing? Is there such a thing as a pipeline when you are on a job by yourself? Is it per project or a company wide thing? Most of the time I either start a project and have to hand it off or get handed one; at what point does the pipeline used or discussed? I know maya has that folder project thing that it makes all the folder for you, is it like that? I wish AE would do that.
Don't I recall Asa busting at least one shot into shake, the occasion on which I coined the term "nerd based compositing"? Belated thanks for getting behind my little miniseries - horses for courses it seems to be, indeed, despite Photoshop's example that there can be an imaging equivalent of Microsoft Word. Maybe compositing/motion graphics is really that much more complicated.
"And i found myself wondering why the hell, none (that i know of) is not working in a open-source node UI for a photoshop killer app."
Blender has node compositing nowadays. You can't yet animate them and rotoing seems to be complex, but whole package has really been running lately. I really hope Blender forces commercial providers to improve their base packages.
As a loooooooong time AE user (started back when it was CoSA 1.0), I gotta jump in on this one - what about, instead of pre-comping, doing parent/child stuff? It inherits the scale/pos/rot/etc. of the parent, just doesn't get plugins applied all the way down. And Adjustment Layers can help tackle that issue as well.
Stu?
-mike
what about, instead of pre-comping, doing parent/child stuff? It inherits the scale/pos/rot/etc. of the parent, just doesn't get plugins applied all the way down. And Adjustment Layers can help tackle that issue as well.
That's the point- you don't want it to apply "all the way down" necessarily. You want it apply to a "certain subset of layers".
I always yelled at Adobe for the simple ability of being able to "open in place" a precomp, i.e. so it "unfolds" in it's location in the parent timeline.
Oh well. Stu was able to drag Adobe kicking and screaming into linear space, maybe he can drag them nodal as well ;)
/Z
There are several things I'd like to say about this. The first, is that it doesn't matter. Someone who is good in After Effects, should stay. Why? Because they can. What one person can do in Fusion or flame, I can do in Paintbrush, if you're catching my drift. In the end, all we're doing, is coloring pixels. Period. Will one thing make it easier than the other? Sure. But if a person can do it well enough in their choice of compositing programs, why should they HAVE TO change?
I like the idea of nodes, but it's like AS2 to AS3, it's a different beast. If AE CS4 or better comes out w/ nodes, I'd crap myself. What would I do with that? I've been using pre-comps for years and years and years. Almost since COSA. If they could come up with some way for them to make it an intuitive free flow, that would be absolutely the best. Imagine going from pre-comp to node, and back on a dime. I'd love to have that!
I was watching cmiTV the other day, and was watching a lame tutorial, and some guy just made a stroke, pluged it into a mask, and said "I dare someone to try that in AE." AE is falling behind. Such a shame for being the BEST. Absolutely EVERY other company tries their damnedest to integrate w/ the AE plugins. In the end, it's just another shell for what we've had since the beginning. LOL. So maybe, we should do our hardest to steal their plugins =D. Then who has the better system. No one. lol.
Hi f0ru0l0rd, thanks for commenting on this old post.
I guess you haven't read other comments from me where I describe a pet peeve of mine. It seems that every time someone wants to discuss tools, there's someone who wants to chime in with a "that's not what matters." Well of course that's true in a way, in fact so much so that it can be said of just about any conversation. You could be discussing your broken leg and I could come by and say "That's nothing compared to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China."
It's OK to discuss tools. Someone considering an SLR purchase is faced with an important decision (often simplified to Canon vs. Nikon). If they want to have a conversation about that they don't need some wise-ass telling them "It doesn't matter, just take good pictures." Sure, that's true, but it doesn't mean that you don't have to decide. And it doesn't render the decision meaningless. It's OK to discuss a smaller part of a larger process. It's OK to discuss something that isn't as important as something else.
I have mentioned here before how annoyed I get with the question of "which compositing software is 'better.'" But discussing how they are different and what their relative strengths and weaknesses are is useful.
http://prolost.blogspot.com/2006/01/mines-better-than-yours.html
You're starting a small visual effects company and about to invest $30,000 in compositing software. Does it matter which you choose? Of course it does.
You're a student hoping to get a job in the industry. Does it matter which compositing software you learn? Maybe less so, but still, the answer is yes.
It seems you agree because you go on to join the very conversation that you began by devaluing.
hey Stu.
After read this post following the 10.01.08 post on the idea of combining AE & PE. I just thought I'd say that I find it very interesting the approach that Adobe is going down with their inclusion of searching functions and the Napoleonic (as in uber small nodal pov) "mini-flowchart". It seems that AE is trying to address the issues we all face as AE users in finding that pre-comp or that one instance of an effect.
I agree that it isnt an issue of 'it all will be the same regardless of software used, it comes down to the user and the speed that they can complete the work. If its a nodal system that floats your boat for creating a stock pile of fx to plug in, or if it is a stack of effects you have saved in an effects preset, the bottom line is that your only as good as your crappiest work and least happy client.
At present I'm learning the Nuke road to compositing. Right now I hate it. I wish I was as fast at doing XY&Z as I am in AE, but I know that I can stay sane and keep the money rolling in faster by doing what I do in AE rather than pretending that because Nodal based workflows are as grand as a White Tiger, I should use that. This is not to say that I don't see the benefits that you and Mark see in that approach. But until my own personal workload can't stand it any longer, I'll wait it out. That is, until I land a job at The Orphanage! hahaha