SilhouetteFX Silhouette experiences?

[Vizioen]

Has anyone tried using Silhouette for animations? https://www.silhouettefx.com/

If so is it better/easier than for instance using Nuke or Fusion or similar. Or is it a completely different software? I've watched some videos and it seems like a nice piece of software.

Reason I'm asking is I'm trying to learn animation compositing/tracking and try to find a good piece of software with not too many bells and whistles but that get's the job done right. I want to use it for arch viz animations.

[joconnell]

Silhouette is only roto / extraction, there's no comp features in it so you'd need another program.

[Neilg]

Just get fusion

[squintnic]

another vote for fusion
free unless you need OFX plugins and even then its cheap!

[Vizioen]

Silhouette is only roto / extraction, there's no comp features in it so you'd need another program.

Aah I see, no dilemmas then. Thank you guys

[fixeighted]

Well that is interesting. It seems they greatly updated Silhouette since I last looked - admittedly years ago. I binned it in favour of Mocha at the time and the rest was hundreds of roto'd clips of history
It's not necessarily a substitute for whatever else is out there - Nuke/Fusion etc. but it's moved way away from the purely roto tool it used to be and now does indeed have comping tools and more.
Depending on what you specifically wanted to do then it looks great.
Out of interest, what exactly did you want to do with whatever?

[Vizioen]

Well I just came across it when browsing actually and thought the preview movie looked pretty intriguing. Since I'm looking into animation, but comping in with drone footage and the likes, I was looking for software that can handle:

- Tracking footage and exporting camera's,
- Comping the renders in the footage (with renderpasses and stuff)
- Adding VFX (like glares, bloom, etc)

(Don't know if I'm missing other stuff, I'm fairly new at this).

[fixeighted]

Hmm...well not knowing how good the tracker is in Silhouette or for that matter Fusion or Nuke (the one in AE is...usable but I wouldn't vote for it) I would probably go for Syntheyes or PFTrack for tracking alone - Syntheyes wins on price for that.
Comping is comping and it's pretty much down to what you feel comfortable with. I'm for AE because that is what I know, though arguably Nuke/Fusion is more worth learning if you have no preference, as everything is going node-based.
They all have the abilities you need and more.
You could get a trial of each and use a real project to see which is better/quicker/most intuitive I guess.
Or farm out all your tracking to me of course, and just get something to do the rest

[joconnell]

+1 for syntheyes for tracking, nuke / fusion is far more flexible for comping passes than ae's timeline, nuke can also get a bit expensive whereas fusion is free for most things.

[Vizioen]

I've tried PFTrack once for a quite simple assignment. Didn't really get what I was doing for a first time of course, but I found it too fiddly to use and didn't get good results. Probably needed a lot more practice of course but the whole matching process in 3dsmax eventually left me wondering if there wasn't a better way / more streamlined solution to all this.

[joconnell]

Tbh camera matching / tracking is a foundation part of fx work, it's worth investing the time to learn one program manually so you're in control of what's happening and you know what's coming out the other side. Starting off a 3d scene from a wrong lens value is fatal.

[Vizioen]

Well lens values I know and that's the first thing I check but it's the fiddling with the scaling that makes it hard. Do you recommend any good courses out there for this by any chance?

[joconnell]

Victor wolansky or matt merkovich are the guys to look at - matt's got some great stuff on his youtube channel, the syntheyes website has a great learning section too.

[fixeighted]

Regarding scale, it's possible to input a specific real-world value for something in the scene, which will give proper scale on export.
When I learned these things there were no tutorials, so I had to go the hard route - now as joconnell says there are literally hundreds of tuts out there.
I would advise using your own project to learn, with support from tuts, rather than any specific course or tutorial scene.

Let's all collectively pat 3DMax on the head and say 'yeeah, of cooourse you have a tracker' and smile comfortingly

[Vizioen]

Thanks guys, looking into it as we speak.