Compositing and VFX Breakdown for my NCC1701 project

I know this won't wow most people here since their knowledge is well over mine, but for great part of last year I worked on a rabbit hole video trying to learn Blender, Fusion Studio and Resolve Studio making a metallic look re-imagining of the Star Trek Enterprise:

Obviously this is not ILM or WETA quality, but I think it looks pretty decent. I worked on it for months and the thing I found most rewarding was to learn how to composite multilayer EXR sequences rendered from Blender in Fusion Studio, how you can manipulate all the different layers of a 3D render to make it look even better than it was.

So I thought I would make a breakdown video of that. It's not a tutorial, and it's a bit long, but I wanted to show 2 seconds per layer, so people can read the name of the layer and see what that layer looks like. I made it shorter and realized that it was too fast to appreciate what was in each layer.

So here's that compositing and VFX breakdown. Most people here are probably experts on these things, in fact I got advice from many of you while working on this project, but perhaps someone who is just getting started with multi-layer compositing can find it useful:

I'm happy to send the comps to anybody who asks me. I'm not certain this is THE way to do this, I learned mostly from a YouTube video, my own experimentation after that video, and pestering you guys for months

You did a really good job. The shot where the Enterprise emerges from the 'red cloud' is especially impressive and seamless. Well done.

You did a really good job. The shot where the Enterprise emerges from the 'red cloud' is especially impressive and seamless. Well done.

Thanks! I would've liked to do something better with the nebula, like the ship "pushing" it as it emerges, like that part in the 2009 Star Trek where the ship comes from below and pushes the cloud up. But not having the first clue on how to do that, it would've taken ages and this already taking too long.

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Because the ship and the nebula were different Blender projects (the ship was rendered in Cycles while the nebulas were rendered in Eevee), I had to do a lot of polyline mask animation:

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Not that I minded at all, for whatever reason I love animating masks. And the masks in Fusion are pretty great, I just wish that the lines could be made a bit thicker, but I like working with them anyway.