Re: @Walter Biscardi: Yes, Autodesk Smoke 2013 Changes Everything

[Ben Rojas] "You're kidding right?"

Well maybe I shouldn't say Smoke is not good for MG and maybe you're used to it and I've seen some people come up with some amazing techniques but IMO AE is more flexible than anything out there for animating text and basic MG. Try 5 plugins per layer and then changing layer priority with all of those plugins still attached while mixing in some composite modes and then being able to tweak the setting on any of those plugins. In AE you just drag it up or down. In Smoke I'd want to shoot myself. A layer in AE has media, animation, plugins, masks, timing all together. Want to make a copy cmd-d and I can make 50 copies in under a minute. Slide it left or right to change timing, delete it hit delete. In Smoke uh give me a few minutes.

Smoke has improved on some of this stuff but something as simple as having a composite mode on a layer and wanting to fade it out could be a pain in the ass because some of them aren't affected by transparency. AE doesn't even blink. And AE has IMO the easiest to tweak KF editor out there. Click on a layer, hit U and every animated property comes up. Slide KFs around, hit 0 for ram preview, everything is so easy to adjust.

I'm not saying you can't do MG in Smoke/Flame as obviously people do but I'm just basing my opinion on experience with both systems and the fact that where I work at Fox in LA we dumped our Flames in the GFX dept and went CD4/AE for just about everything we do. So maybe I shouldn't say that Smoke sux at motion graphics but it's far less intuitive than AE and there are far more plugins for AE and yes those plugins cost less for AE. We still have Smokes at Fox but they get used more for compositing and grading while just about every animated graphic comes out of C4D/AE and we do thousands and thousands of graphics a year at Fox. And until today the price to match that kind of volume would be enormously higher.

Also try going into somebody else's project in Smoke to say fix spelling. In Smoke you can build things 50 different ways in and out of various modules that all can have settings saved in different places if at all - except if you use batch or have batch. In AE it all comes up and is all live, find the text layer re-type and re-render done in 5 minutes. In Smoke you can spend 20 mins or more just trying to reverse engineer somebody else's work flow.

I like Smoke but in my world all of the coolest design stuff and the sheer volume comes out of AE and Smoke/Flame gets used more for shot based compositing for features and commercials.

Robert Brown
Editor/VFX/Colorist - FCP, Smoke, Quantel Pablo, After Effects, 3DS MAX, Premiere Pro

http://vimeo.com/user3987510/videos