Compositors Decision

Discussions about FX-Tree and Compositing generally

What compositor would you use

Poll ended at 06 Nov 2012, 03:35

Autodesk Composite
2
10%
Adobe After Effects
8
40%
Softimage FXTree
10
50%
 
Total votes: 20

forton
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Re: Compositors Decision

Post by forton » 25 Oct 2012, 21:16

One thing about blender i find a big problem for a compositer, it's NOT multithreaded. :(

Falam

Re: Compositors Decision

Post by Falam » 26 Oct 2012, 17:57

luceric wrote:I have difficulty with the Composite UI, but it's a vastly superior floating point compositor than the FxTree, and in the same class as Nuke in terms of architecture, speed and floating point support. And it supports OpenFX plug-ins. They fixed these stability issues last year, I'm told.
I read about this. This is a tough choice, I like that composite is free and node based, I don't like that it feels as though it's going to fall apart in my hands, not literally.

FXTree does have nodes, is free, lacks the floating point that I probably will use.

Adobe After Effects, well, what can I say, layer based, it will set me back a pretty penny, and it still requires more money to be spent because the in package tools, are not as great as custom plug-ins, unless someone knows any free plug-ins that are great to use with After Effects.

Nuke and Fusion are out of my league, it will be a waste to spend on these great packages and only spend half of my time in compositing.

I've been thinking about Sony Vegas if it can do some compositing, I've read that it can do compositing fairly well, any options on this ?

grahamef
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Joined: 23 Jun 2009, 21:01

Re: Compositors Decision

Post by grahamef » 26 Oct 2012, 18:56

Falam wrote: FXTree does have nodes, is free, lacks the floating point that I probably will use.
The FxTree does have some floating-point abilities: http://download.autodesk.com/global/doc ... 7DF34B6952

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ActionArt
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Re: Compositors Decision

Post by ActionArt » 26 Oct 2012, 19:21

Wouldn't it be nice if they would take the guts from Composite and put them in the FXtree interface. Last time I used Composite the screen wouldn't even redraw and every window opened just left black holes wherever it closed. Pretty unusable in that state. I have no idea if that's been fixed or not.

luceric
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Re: Compositors Decision

Post by luceric » 26 Oct 2012, 20:19

the first release of composite was difficult to get up and running, because it was made to run on a specific hardware configuration and required some nvidia opengl extension. It also had an unitialized variable bug that took a year to finally find. everything should be fine now.
it does tile based rendering and can handle images up to 12kx12k, float and half float processing, multithreading and everything. but most importantly, the image processing nodes where all thought for floating point and hdr processing. in the fxtree, the floating point stuff is an afterthough and you can't trust it to not clamp HDR values.

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gustavoeb
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Re: Compositors Decision

Post by gustavoeb » 26 Oct 2012, 20:50

Yeh fxtree defenetly clamps stuff... with such an architecture.one wonders why ad dumped it
Gustavo Eggert Boehs
Blog: http://www.gustavoeb.com.br/

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Mathaeus
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Re: Compositors Decision

Post by Mathaeus » 27 Oct 2012, 02:04

yeah that clamping under the hood, could be a small nightmare..... I think good old Combustion was able to properly deal with floating point exr (slow but anyway), only when using straight alpha. With pre-multiplied alpha, it elegantly clamped the footage, no color over 1 anymore.... But both fX Tree and Combustion are from last decade. Today, someone would expect something better from After Effects or Photoshop, instead of fixed solution. At least some option in preferences. I'd believe After Effects still clamps the footage before multiplying by alpha, then releases the rest into borders, something like....
Honestly I'd try to avoid floating point output in everyday life, it's just easier to live without. But when it comes to glowing, blooming, transparency... that's another story.
Anyway just to show about what on the earth I'm talking, here's screenshot from Blender 2.64. There's visible line on hair in viewer, bellow line is expected behavior, color over 1 looks like spreading around alpha, probably because the "original" color is multiplied. Above line is ( simulated), "clamped" behavior of After Effects - some details are missing.
And... a nice new Bokeh Blur node on top of viewer, able to do blur of variable size. That is, variable size driven by another pic, not a lame blending of blurred layer. Well there is no that much of available effects in Blender compositor, no film grain or like, but it seems that everything works properly with floating point stuff, including automatic recognition of color space.

[rimg=800]http://www.matkovic.com/anto/blend_composite.jpg[/rimg]

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Draise
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Re: Compositors Decision

Post by Draise » 29 Oct 2012, 21:07

;;)

I like SI's internal FX tree compositing system. It's very powerful and easy to use, simple enough, just I still don't know how to tell where the mask keys are in the Animation Fcurve, or how to edit mask keys. But no biggie, sometimes frame by frame is not too much of a hard task. I use it A LOT, it's quick, easy and simple enough with a good selection of nodes that makes anything possible.

On the other hand though, I use Blender's compositing system when I feel like it, I have gotten some quick and easy results. It's interface is a little less smooth over SI's, but it does the trick.

Last weekend I made this little scene in blender to try it out..

Image

Image

My only complaint is that it is slow to compute, as mentioned above, no multithreading it seems?

If not, I am kinda keeping my eye on this other free flipbook/compositor/post effects software, Jefecheck.

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ActionArt
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Re: Compositors Decision

Post by ActionArt » 17 Nov 2012, 03:19

I've finally spent a bit of time with Composite trying to overcome the interface and now I'm starting to like it a bit. It seems quite quick and the display issues seem to have been fixed for me at least. It's actually not too hard to work with if you spend a little time up front.

Letterbox
Posts: 391
Joined: 17 Jun 2009, 14:49

Re: Compositors Decision

Post by Letterbox » 18 Nov 2012, 10:40

Mathaeus wrote:And... a nice new Bokeh Blur node on top of viewer, able to do blur of variable size. That is, variable size driven by another pic, not a lame blending of blurred layer. Well there is no that much of available effects in Blender compositor, no film grain or like, but it seems that everything works properly with floating point stuff, including automatic recognition of color space.
I wouldn't worry about the lack of film grain etc, as most of the composting packages don't do it correctly, ie look at the response curves of individual RBG depending on what type of film it's iso etc. Kodak have the Selwyn granularity and much more for each film, in pdf, I think Agfa/Fuji do to, you'll have to hunt for it. Or you can try FGO for your fav film stock, I'm sure blender etc can all do that. FGO explained here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_grain

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origin
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Location: warsaw

Re: Compositors Decision

Post by origin » 18 Nov 2012, 13:29

well, nuke&furnace got some decent grain filters with presets, plus you can grab a noise pattern from a frame and save it for later reusing. ae grain is too slow too be used in anything tho

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