Combustion or After Effects for VRay

[dapeter]

Honestly if you're setting up a new machine and on a budget (and don't have a machine yet), I'd say get an Intel Mac with Shake. If you're doing a lot of greenscreen work, you'll get Primatte and Keylight, which are both great keyers. Just be ready - if you don't have a great camcorder keying won't be fun nomatter what keyer you use. Also, you can get Final Cut Pro and Motion for it.

If you're still going to stick with Windows, there's also DFX+, which is basically 8-bit Fusion.

[panthon]

. I'm using fusion and exr.

Is fusion able to read channels (reflection, refraction, objectID, Moblur, etc) inside an EXR file?

[Infrared digital]

Thanks for the replies.

Dapeter, Macs are the way forward I agree but we are sorta stuck with PCs at present so maybe in the future.

Do you have an idea of what digital HD camera to recommend ?

Combustions color correction is excellent but After Effects seems to be winning slightly in this thread.

[panthon]

Thanks for the replies.


Do you have an idea of what digital HD camera to recommend ?

Panasonic HVX200

[Infrared digital]

Nice, thanks for that.

[Neilg]

After effects is tighter, but after using nodes in any other comping program it feels like such a step backwards. Keeping track of whats going on is a dream when using nodes, and its so easy to go back and re-edit, knowing exactly what it is youre editing.

[joconnell]

Plus there's lots of cases where you need to precomp stuff in after effects so that another layer can pick up changes to a layers alpha - nesting is the worst area of after effects in my opinion and a node based comper does it much better.

[panthon]

Does anyone know anything about Toxic? Im curious about it but never tried...

[dlparisi]

Plus there's lots of cases where you need to precomp stuff in after effects so that another layer can pick up changes to a layers alpha - nesting is the worst area of after effects in my opinion and a node based comper does it much better.

Yes, definitely a problem with AE. Another problem with the pre-comping is that all of the individual layers from that precomp aren't available to the new comp for mattes, transforms, etc. or if you just want to reuse a layer.

And the flowchart view is pretty much useless IMO.

[joconnell]

Does anyone know anything about Toxic? Im curious about it but never tried...

It's shite. They've only now gotten a 2d transform tool. It may end up being very good but at the moment it do3esnt have a decent enough toolset to make it useful. Shake 2.51 still beats it.

[Infrared digital]

So is Combustion a better choice in general ?

[joconnell]

I prefer after effects personally but any of the apps can do what you want really. Combustion is the cheapest option too.

[Infrared digital]

I would imagine that when compositing with lots of layers and video footage that the file would become a beast to work with.

Is either of the programs more logical or have good workflow methods than the other ?

[Sushidelic]

Talking about the cheapest... this would be the way to go

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...nMore=MA434Z/A

been using flame, inferno, df, combustion, ae... and shake is unbeatable AT THAT PRICE

regards, michael

[joconnell]

After effects is easiest to go to if you're used to photoshop.