Alternatives to AE and Premiere

[tricky]

What are you guys using as alternatives to After Effects and Premiere Pro?

We've had such an awful time trying to upgrade our Adobe suite of products, we want to pull the plug. They are a bunch of *****S!

[Neilg]

Composite, which comes free with max!

We're using premiere still, but i've heard really good things about final cut pro and sony vegas. I think fcp is the better one, but it may be mac only.

[mike_kennedy]

Vegas is nice. Fusion, COmposite and Nuke are all way better then AE but node based you you will need a bit of time to get your head around them.

[tricky]

I've briefly looked at Nuke and it does seem to be a powerful package. I like the fact that they are largely UK based as well.

[Morne]

A better solution to Premiere is Avid Liquid (although it is now dicontinued). The "upgarde" path from that is Avid Media Composer which is current and I think the new version is v5 and it has a pretty big following. Very powerfull.
"Upgrade" from AE I would have to go for Nuke, although personally untill such time that I can afford Nuke, I would just use AE. Those 2 seems to be mainstream and what most people use. I don't want to go down the road again of getting into Toxik (this new Composer) that comes with max. I recon that is going same route as Combustion ie. no more development it seems to me. Besides AE and Nuke has a much bigger following and user base it appears and the thing to learn I would say. At the end of the day bigger studios all seem to be switching to Nuke

[Neilg]

The thing about using node based compositors though is once you learn one you've pretty much learnt them all - apart from a few app specific tools. It's takes no time at all to transfer between them, so if you've got something like composite available it may be worth using for a bit before switching to a more powerful one.

[Donald2B]

I agree with cubiclegangster here. I picked up Nuke because I hated AE and felt very limited to what I could do with it. Constantly struggling with multi-channel EXRs and things like that. Fusion is a great package also, the only reason I didn't go that route was that I would need to shuffle out all my passes to RGB every time. Just didn't seem like a very good work flow to me.

I do read most of the tutorial for fusion and apply them to Nuke and it has been a great learning experience. Nuke has almost completely replaced photoshop for me. I only use photoshop if I need to touch up/paint something in that I can't fix in Nuke, which isn't much. I know that I still have a LOT to learn about Nuke, but it allows me to do things WAY faster and when I save my files, they are only 25KB or so. Very tiny, compared to my 2GB PSD files.

[Da_elf]

edit with video post in max hehehe

[Donald2B]

@Da_elf: I actually LOL! People are now looking at me funny.

[MoonDoggie]

Nuke is incredible, +1 for that if you want to do even simple compositing. It's definitely worth doing some tutorials and learning.

[trixian]

If you are only going to do really simple stuff, you can also try out ramen:
http://ramenhdr.sourceforge.net/index.html

Very limited though.

Edit: Hmmm. Can't seem to find the windows build anymore on the site, only the linux ones.
Edit2: ok look here instead: http://blog.ramenfx.org/

As a side note, blender has a nice node based compositor as well, but then you need to whip your self with a ninetail whip to try to block out the pain using the UI from the bowels of hell.

[tricky]

As a side note, blender has a nice node based compositor as well, but then you need to whip your self with a ninetail whip to try to block out the pain using the UI from the bowels of hell.

Funny!!! Will take a look.

[joconnell]

I like sony vegas as a quick and dirty editor and another vote for nuke.

[sandykoufax]

Ramen project is closed.

http://blog.ramenfx.org/blog/2010/10/27/project-closed/