Learning shake or AE to do specific tasks
by francisco bech Gómez
on
Oct 22, 2009 at 6:21:51 am
Hello to everyone, I have tree specific problems to reselve in a documentary I am doing miself and dont have experience with after effects or Shake, so I have to learn the any of the two programs from the beggining and I just want to go in the quickest and good direction, from what I have read so far i guess is probably shake
1) I hve some moving up and down subtitles in old TV footage, I want make then dissapear
2) I have two fixed and exectly the same shots of sunset over buildings. In one of then I have a good sky and the other good buildings , I would like to merge both
3) I have a shoot with the central character in the right , I would like to move backgroung and centered this character, then use the erased background to cover the left space in the right.
I have acess to both programas. Which one you think will suit this better?
Re: Learning shake or AE to do specific tasks by Burt Hazard on Oct 22, 2009 at 11:32:54 pm
Well actually either Shake of AE would allow you to do these shots. Since Adobe has added Imagineer's Mocha to AE it now has good rotoscoping functionality and both Shake and AE can do decent paint work which is sort of the direction I think you'll have to go in for your shots:
1) Shake's QuickPaint node could be used to get rid of subtitles
2) Looks like a straight-forward garbage matte job
3) A lot of work, but probably could be done. You'll have to roto your character and then either paint or use a wraparound (possibly using Shake's AutoAlign) to recreate your BG plate.
This question gets asked a lot and the quick answer is of course that both Shake and AE are great for compositing work, but in AE you can also do motion graphics. Technically you can in Shake as well, but it would be a cumbersome nightmare since it is really set up for a strictly compositing workflow. :)
(And personally I use Silhouette Roto whenever I have a lot of precision roto work to do and import the shapes into Shake, since it is much better at that since it is designed to be a dedicated roto and paint tool. Usually the only times I create new shapes with Shake's RotoShape node is when I'm just doing simple garbage mattes and stuff like that.)
Both Shake and AE are deep programs with steep learning curves but approaching it the way you are can work, i.e. getting started right away on a real project. I really started to get comfortable with Shake when I started using it in real projects.
