Carmi Weinzweig wrote:Other than the VCP Flares plug-in, and the built in tracker (possibly vs. Mocha Pro as a plug-in), what other tools do you feel are lacking? Does the ability to have render nodes have any value for you? (Do others use them? If so, are they easy or hard to configure?) What would have to change to push you over the edge to make Fusion your primary platform?
Good question. Undoubtedly there is the issue of time -- i.e. there's never enough of it. So when I'm in a crunch to crank out a composite, I'm just naturally faster in AE. Fusion right now is fighting me every step of the way because it takes very little to bring me to my knees due to my lack of knowledge. Right now I'm working on a personal sci/fi project which is a good setting to push myself to use Fusion. The first hurdle for me was the VCP Optical Flares, I found the ones in Fusion not on par in quality and realism. Another hurdle is pixel motion blur, I wish Fusion had a node for this. In AE it's one of the built-in plugins which extrapolates the data from frame-by-frame analysis. In Fusion, I watched a tutorial for bringing in vector data from C4D and it seemed absurdly complex for something that should be a click-and-go type of thing.
Basically, each and every time I've tried to do something in Fusion, I get pretty far, but I reach a point where I can't get it to do a certain something, and I'm forced to either give up on that something, or crawl back to AE where I know I can do it easily. Some of it is of course due to my lack of knowledge, but some of it is that Fusion simply doesn't yet have the type of functionality that I have come to rely on in AE.
Saying "oh, you could buy this OFX plug in, or that version of Mocha or Syntheyes" is a bit of a non-starter. I've already spent a great deal of cash for a bunch of plugins, and to have to buy some more just so that I can do something in Fusion that I can already do in AE isn't a very convincing argument.
So right off the bat, if I had a personal wish list for Fusion 9, it would be (not necessarily in this order):
- Built in frame-analysis pixel blur node.
- Better, more realistic flares.
- Either having a version of Mocha built it, or a similar Fusion planar tracker.
- A camera tracker/solver.
I think that's basically what I reach for 99% of the time I use AE. I know that Fusion has everything else (Curves, Glow, Noise generators, particles, blurs, etc).