Getting started

[Lompoc42]

I’m currently teaching multimedia at a school in Wellington, New Zealand. My portion of the teaching, in our course, is mostly audio/video and also web/interactive.

Currently I teach my students Final Cut Pro and After Effects. Whereas I am comfortable with these applications, it appears that they’re not readily used by the big boys (however please correct me if I’m wrong).

I would love nothing more than to be able to teach my students the software and the basic techniques (at least whatever I can cram into my head) used by the pros, but I really have no idea where to even begin. The more I read around, the more I keep seeing the various Discreet application names (flame, inferno, combustion, etc) and the more I wonder what they actually do, which ones I should be using, and how the heck I could learn them — as they look insanely complicated.

I’ve been given approval for a generous learning budget in order to teach myself/be trained in some of these applications in order to advance our program, but I’m clueless where to even start.

So I ask you kind folks if you could point me in the right direction. IÂ’m not new to this field by any means, but I suppose IÂ’ve been rather left out of the loop as far as the “big boys’ toys” are concerned. I appreciate any and all responses you have time for. Thank you for reading.[/code]

[dondelipe]

Not sure who the big boys are, but if you have a few bucks left after you make your purchase, or if you find they’re too difficult to learn and teach, you might want to thow in PD Pro Digital painter for some fun matte painting and animation (PC only). There’s also a free version 1.2

http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/free

Save anims to image sequences or AVI. Should work well with many of the big boys

[angus]

Hi,

your doing your students no disservice teaching them FCP and AE. both applications dominate their market sectors and will probably continue to do so for the forseeable future, the most important things for the students to learn is technique: if they nail that then they can easily transfer those skills to different applications. It does however depend what the focus of your course is on, If for example your looking to AE primarily as a motion graphics tool then it’s argueably unsurpassed. If however your course is biased towards compositing then Apple Shake and Discreet combustion are better compositing App’s (AE is a decent compositor but lacks a schematic “tree”).

You might also look at teaching them painting and roto skills (for matte extraction), Curious Gfx is king of the hill in that market sector. Or you might want to look at adding a 3D app to your arsenal so that a student would have the option to go that way if thats what interested them. A word of warning though 3D is a pretty big hill to climb.

If you did decide to go for a 3D app then most 3D apps and compositing app’s work together to a greater or lesser degree but the best combo’s are probably:

Shake>>>Maya
Combustion>>3Ds Max
AE>>Cinema 4D

Flame and Inferno are hero compositing systems costing hundreds of thousands and are way out of reach, ditto Smoke and Fire for finishing editing

HTH

Angus

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