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My studio is looking for a more advanced composting platform then our trusty AE. we are 4-5 guy shop looking to expand into visual effects.
We want 3d composting, 32bit float, software only (no systems like flame Etc.), and GOOD network rendering.
At the top of my short list is Nuke, Fusion, and a holding spot for what will be ‘phenomenon’
I like Nuke because history with DD and now the Foundry, even more now with Old Shake poeple working on Nuke.
Eyeons Fusion seams to be a real workhourse for big houses like Zoic studios, and seems very mature.
phenomenon’ am i stupid for thinking this will be anything more then Motion 4? 3 years ago the said it would be coming in ’08. I understand production delays, but Apple has SOO much going on (iphone iphone iphone…ow ya we still make computers) That i fear this would not even be a mature product for at least 2-3 versions (like Toxic).
If i forgot a package or sound like an idiot please tell me, and inform me to the errors of my ways.
Thanks in advance.
Toxic is probably the best adapted for 32 bit image processing, Nuke has the best 3D forging tools…However I would argue that Shake gives the best of both and for a good price too. As far as phenominom goes I know as much as you do, but if I may say one thing Shake has been the go to package for the last 10 years, I don’t think the developers at apple will let down the legions of eager artists waiting to test drive it its hard to say…
but if you are currently running AE then get some Shake licenses until then…you will spend way less verses if you bought Nuke, and still be able to afford, or at least consider purchasing phenominon
Thanks, that the kinda advise i was hopping to hear.
I agree AE & Shake seams to be a great midterm solution. I am even more intreges about nuke now since I’m a 3d guy mainly.
I am just dieing to see what Apple calls a “Flame KILLER” But one thing i did see on a rumors site is that Apple in looking into having a Cell Processor in a PCI express slot that would but used by this software. It makes sence since apple is total moving into the GPU/FPU rendering area, and the Cell is basically a GPU/FPU farm. I remember hearing something like 4k editing in realtime. Not impossible, just look at the new DaVinci systems, and that’s all running on Nvidia hardware.
the last rumor ive heard is that phenomenon is going to be a combination of shake and what is supposed to be motion 4 and is supposedly to be packaged with FCS 3 and not sold as a stand alone like shake.
if there is truth to this that would add a lot more bang to your final cut buck, shake is a great application and at $499, a friggin steal. the thing that i really dont want to see happen is shakes features/flexibility mixed with motions back end performance. i just hope phenomenon turns out to be a shake 5 more than a motion 4 if that makes any sense.
as a side note i heard these rumors a while ago and is purely speculation. i have yet to see any reliable info on what we can expect, so if anyone knows if there is any truth to this, please post any validation or correction. id love to know.
I have zero faith in Apple delivering anything qualifying as a “professional” app at this point. I’d love love to be proven wrong, but after spending some time with Color I have zero faith in their pro agenda going forward. I have a friend of a friend (I know right?) who says it’s going to be amazing, but we’ll see. If it ever comes out that is.
I also don’t see them getting into the business of beating flame. Building turnkey solutions has never been something Apple’s cared about. I don’t see them starting now, especially with such a small and specific target. I would like to see them try, because as much as I love flame, I wouldn’t mind some competition.
@andy_dill 27725 wrote:
I have zero faith in Apple delivering anything qualifying as a “professional” app at this point. I’d love love to be proven wrong, but after spending some time with Color I have zero faith in their pro agenda going forward.
to be honest i couldn’t agree more. shake is great because it was built by people who specialize in vfx in one aspect or another on a day to day basis. now i would imagine apple has a great deal of resources for advisors on product development but at the same time i dont quite think they have their “finger on the pulse” like nreal did when shake was built and can’t see them throwing much more at it with the birth of the iphone and all.
the bottom line is there is a way lager profit margin iphones and the app store and all the other product than there is for a niche market like ours. i really hope that it is all we ever dreamt it would be and more (im bit of an apple fanboy), but realistically i just dont see them throwing as much at its development to really make it fill shakes shoes as we would like.
mindset of typical apple customer-
IPHONE 3G: oh yeah, my mom has one, those are great, sold out first day world wide.
FCS 2: fcs what?
@Nick Donlon 27728 wrote:
the bottom line is there is a way lager profit margin iphones and the app store and all the other product than there is for a niche market like ours. i really hope that it is all we ever dreamt it would be and more (im bit of an apple fanboy), but realistically i just dont see them throwing as much at its development to really make it fill shakes shoes as we would like.
Yeah I mostly agree, but i think apple is still making some nice money out of selling mac pro, and who is going to buy them if there is not “pro” application to run on it. I think apple will continue dev final cut studio, but is not going to have a replacement for shake. Shake functionality will be spread in fcp, color, motion, etc…
cheers,
antoine.@[email protected] 25694 wrote:
Toxic is probably the best adapted for 32 bit image processing, Nuke has the best 3D forging tools…However I would argue that Shake gives the best of both and for a good price too.
How can you say Shake gives the best of both worlds when 3D is so limited in Shake? Nuke is awesome when it comes to 3D and honestly the little that Shake has doesn’t even work as it was supposed to work.
@andy_dill 27725 wrote:
I have zero faith in Apple delivering anything qualifying as a “professional” app at this point. I’d love love to be proven wrong, but after spending some time with Color I have zero faith in their pro agenda going forward.
I don’t understand why you would say that, specially in relation to Color. It is no Da Vinci but it is definitely professional. This is the reason most FCP editors can’t handle it. Color use to be a high price stand alone application before Apple bought it. If you can’t afford Da Vinci, Pablo, or Lustre etc, there’s not much out there that can top color.
i think you should try NUKE for a start, it has very powerfull 3D space, it support open EXR render layers, so that you can work with all the passes from 3D department.
with NUKE, it feels like you have a compositing and 3D software all in one package.
it could handle large format project nicely
Plus, furnace plugin is now available for NUKE, which i reckon is a very nice and useful plugin to speed up your work.
but compare to flame and shake, the UI seems that you have to digging all these sub menu
just to find the tool that you want.on the other side..flame and shake got all the tools laid out there outside, it’s good for
the workflow.indra iwan
flame inferno artist
@Tonfa-Ho 27882 wrote:
I don’t understand why you would say that, specially in relation to Color. It is no Da Vinci but it is definitely professional. This is the reason most FCP editors can’t handle it. Color use to be a high price stand alone application before Apple bought it. If you can’t afford Da Vinci, Pablo, or Lustre etc, there’s not much out there that can top color.
Maybe I was missing something, and that’s entirely possible, but when I was trying to get it to do basic things like curves it was failing horribly. Things I have zero trouble doing in AE, Photoshop, Combustion, Nuke and Flame were not behaving even remotely closely. It couldn’t manage to clamp blacks, the tracker wouldn’t attach to a gmask, I had almost zero success with the week I spent reading the manual and doing tutorials. Could be I’m completely wrong about Color. It’s definitely possible.
That being said, I still maintain that Apple’s indifference to Color and to Shake is proof enough that they’re not interested in pursuing professional grade apps. Final Cut was a huge hit for them, but I feel like acquisitions like Color and Shake were just ways to say “Don’t abandon us, we’re serious about pro apps”. Four years later, I don’t see it; I’m looking over at windows machines with 64 bit versions of Maya, Adobe, Nuke and most everything else yet Apple can’t even bother to upgrade it’s own in-house software to utilize the enormous amounts of RAM you can put into a Mac Pro. Even Linux machines have more 64 bit graphics apps on them.
I’d love to be proven wrong. I’d love to have a reason to upgrade my Shake license or boot up Color again. In the back of my mind I’ve got my fingers crossed that this NAB (or adjacent Apple event) is the one where they bring apple pro software to the forefront.
Guess we’ll wait and see. If I have to eat crow, I’ll do it gladly.
well, from my experience, the thing with going the “APPLE” way is that
the hardware is not upgradeable like PC.
If you thinking for a long term i think PC is the best way to go,
because you can upgrade the hardware
when new motherboard,CPU,etc available. With apple, the hardware itself
is expensive, and when you want to upgrade to the next generation of hardware
you have to buy the whole new apple workstation which gonna cost you another fortune.
even when phenomenon comes out, i don’t think is going to be a real flame killer, flame
has a dedicated stone fs hardware system, that’s what makes flame a real workhorse.
and what is the current flame/inferno running on….is on PC with linux OS only =):cool:
@andy_dill 27892 wrote:
Maybe I was missing something, and that’s entirely possible, but when I was trying to get it to do basic things like curves it was failing horribly. Things I have zero trouble doing in AE, Photoshop, Combustion, Nuke and Flame were not behaving even remotely closely. It couldn’t manage to clamp blacks, the tracker wouldn’t attach to a gmask, I had almost zero success with the week I spent reading the manual and doing tutorials. Could be I’m completely wrong about Color. It’s definitely possible.
I really think you are, honestly. I have absolutely no problems in doing what you mentioned above. Specially AE, it’s a joke compared to Color in terms of color grading.
What machine are you running it on? Could be the graphics card or that you have not set your preferences right, or maybe you just don’t know how to use it. Color is very different than all other Apple pro apps. Only Shake is slightly similar since it’s also node based. But Color has a very steep learning curve and many FCP editors have a problem with it because they can’t get their heads around it and try to approach it’s tools as if they were FCP color wheels. Color is very powerful in the right hands. It’s fantastic we get it for free in FCS 2.I mean, can you elaborate on the problems you are having? Just yesterday I had a grade which had 7 powerwindows, 4 of them with tracks and I had no problems. It works like a clock.
@inch 27893 wrote:
well, from my experience, the thing with going the “APPLE” way is that
the hardware is not upgradeable like PC.
If you thinking for a long term i think PC is the best way to go,
because you can upgrade the hardware
when new motherboard,CPU,etc available. With apple, the hardware itself
is expensive, and when you want to upgrade to the next generation of hardware
you have to buy the whole new apple workstation which gonna cost you another fortune.
even when phenomenon comes out, i don’t think is going to be a real flame killer, flame
has a dedicated stone fs hardware system, that’s what makes flame a real workhorse.
and what is the current flame/inferno running on….is on PC with linux OS only =):cool:
I’m sorry to disagree, but as an user who switches daily from PC and Apple platforms in my work I have to say I will never take a PC over a Mac. Yes, Apple has been slow in terms of 64bit implementation , probably because they are more worried about the iPhone which is what is keeping the company afloat and the reason Apple is one of the very few American companies that is actually growing and the stock raising. They have to keep it up and the iPhone is what is saving them. But even so, a Mac is better designed and more stable than any PC out there and this come from a hardware/OS combination. Windows is a joke as a operating system. It was dumbed down for computer illiterate people and started it’s life already on the left foot. Vista is 64bit but can’t compare to Leopard. Linux is a good OS though but very limited on the applications side though.
The whole concept Mac’s are more expensive is just bogus and a left over from many years ago. Yes, Macs cost more than your made in Taiwan PC’s put together with the cheapest parts or than the PC you can build at home with the parts you picked up across the internet in the sale bins, but when you compare a Mac to a decent PC like a HP of the same specs their are similarly priced. The idea that you can’t upgrade a Mac is also bogus. I just got some more RAM for mine. Now you can’t or rather shouldn’t try to upgrade the processor or mobo but quite honestly once you need to upgrade a processor is probably time to buy a new machine anyways and upgrading the mobo is stupid since you will most likely have to upgrade a lot of other things with it so might as well buy a new machine. If you are a professional and use the machine to make money you shouldn’t cheap out. Also, try to sell a 2 month old PC and see how much you get, while G5’s are still selling for good money on Ebay. Why PCs hold the same value in the used marked as a banana pill while Macs have a great second hand value? Food for thought isn’t i? 🙂
I will never buy another windows laptop. I got a top of the line laptop and paid over 2 grand for it and 6 months later I couldn’t sell it for 500 bucks while a mac laptop of the same age was still going for 1,500 used. Good things cost money and you can debate forever but if they were not good they couldn’t sell them.i rest my case =)
but with the my experience working in one of the post house that uses
mac base computers, it is hard to sell our G5 to get a decent second hand price.even , no one wants to buy it, and the price drop drastically that until now we still
stick to it. only the LCD monitor that still has a price value on it, cos we use the huge
apple cinema display that quite expensive on the price tag.and if apple is the way to go…why autodesk doesn’t use apple for their flame/inferno solution,
instead they go for PC with HP workstation on linux OS..there must be some reason to it.
we’re talking about the ferrari of compositing software.peace:cool::cool:
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