Whats the alternative to Adobe After Effects ?

[AjnabiZ]

hello

Whats the alternative to Adobe after effects ?

Can sony vegas pro be used for effects or is it more of an alternative to Premiere pro ?

[aedipuss]

vegas has some transitions but no it's not like a.e., as it's an editor like p.p.

[AjnabiZ]

So theres only Adobe after effects to work with

[Steve Stepoway]

Whether there are alternatives depends on what you want to do. Exactly what are you trying to do?

[budwzr]

hello

Whats the alternative to Adobe after effects ?

Can sony vegas pro be used for effects or is it more of an alternative to Premiere pro ?

Of course Vegas can be used to create all kinds of effects. Where AE has the edge is comets, fireballs, shatters, canned stuff like that, that are hardly ever used, except for noobs, because everyone knows it's coming from AE.

I don't use that stuff myself, but this http://youtu.be/IJdWnJYBnuI?hd=1 was made with Vegas. The 3D extrusions I did in Aurora Animation Maker $39.

Having said that, Vegas does not offer anything prebuilt except the usual cheesy transitions. So you will have to play with the tools and let your creativity flow.

The reason AE costs so much is that Adobe has to license all these effects from various vendors. Adobe doesn't actually make anything themselves, they aggregate other people's stuff. Like "Flash" VP6 .flv was licensed from a small little known company.

So don't be fooled by the high price, that it's "all that".

As an example of the two styles of the software, Vegas has a fractal generator that can be used to make clouds, lightning bolts, and whatever else you want to do. It doesn't specifically have a lightning effect plugin like AE.

Another example is a gradient fade. Vegas lets you bring your own gradient and will animate the fade from dark to light so the possibilities are limitless.

The Vegas toolset has things like Cookie Cutter, that simply uses standard circles, squares, rectangles, etc. as positive or negative masks. Again, unlimited possibilities.

In the video I posted there is a face of a jester winking. That jester is a photograph from the wall of a building in Venice, CA. I took the still into a graphics program and using a deform tool I created a still image sequence (animation), then brought it into Vegas as a video event. There is no "Make a face wink" plugin, therefore it is a unique effect that people haven't seen too much.

The main difference in Pro vs. MS is compositing tools and bezier masking. Vegas Pro supports all the major compositing operators. Again, these raw tools are limitled only by your imagination.

I better get off my soapbox, PDR's gonna hammer me here anytime soon

[guns1inger]

There are plenty of alternatives, although cost can get prohibitive for normal folk. Digital Fusion, Nuke, Motion (Mac only) are all good at many of the same things at AE, and often better at many of them. Many 3D programs now have compositors built-in - Maya, 3DS Max, Houdini, even Blender have these abilities.

[AjnabiZ]

hello

Whats the alternative to Adobe after effects ?

Can sony vegas pro be used for effects or is it more of an alternative to Premiere pro ?

Of course Vegas can be used to create all kinds of effects. Where AE has the edge is comets, fireballs, shatters, canned stuff like that, that are hardly ever used, except for noobs, because everyone knows it's coming from AE.

I don't use that stuff myself, but this http://youtu.be/IJdWnJYBnuI?hd=1 was made with Vegas. The 3D extrusions I did in Aurora Animation Maker $39.

Having said that, Vegas does not offer anything prebuilt except the usual cheesy transitions. So you will have to play with the tools and let your creativity flow.

The reason AE costs so much is that Adobe has to license all these effects from various vendors. Adobe doesn't actually make anything themselves, they aggregate other people's stuff. Like "Flash" VP6 .flv was licensed from a small little known company.

So don't be fooled by the high price, that it's "all that".

As an example of the two styles of the software, Vegas has a fractal generator that can be used to make clouds, lightning bolts, and whatever else you want to do. It doesn't specifically have a lightning effect plugin like AE.

Another example is a gradient fade. Vegas lets you bring your own gradient and will animate the fade from dark to light so the possibilities are limitless.

The Vegas toolset has things like Cookie Cutter, that simply uses standard circles, squares, rectangles, etc. as positive or negative masks. Again, unlimited possibilities.

In the video I posted there is a face of a jester winking. That jester is a photograph from the wall of a building in Venice, CA. I took the still into a graphics program and using a deform tool I created a still image sequence (animation), then brought it into Vegas as a video event. There is no "Make a face wink" plugin, therefore it is a unique effect that people haven't seen too much.

The main difference in Pro vs. MS is compositing tools and bezier masking. Vegas Pro supports all the major compositing operators. Again, these raw tools are limitled only by your imagination.

I better get off my soapbox, PDR's gonna hammer me here anytime soon

Thanks for the detailed post.

I like the way your 3d Logo rotates and changes color with a hint of transparency.

Here is what i am trying to get:

http://videohive.net/item/sand-away/243961

http://videohive.net/item/orb-sand-intro-3-in-1/223234

http://videohive.net/item/sand-effect-ball/112736


Sand effects on Text. I need something like that for the opening of my video. Those are available for purchase and are cheap. Maybe, ill buy some.


This is just quite beautiful

http://videohive.net/item/fire-reveal/460571

[chowmein]

BluffTitler can do fancy stuff like that (text effects/ particle & fire effects etc). Or as guns1inger pointed out, Blender (free) which is a super-powerful full-featured suite.

[budwzr]

I see you have champagne tastes, but does stuff like that work for a lecture? Don't make the mistake of showcasing yourself too much

Actually, you CAN do this in Vegas, but it requires mentally deconstructing the effect first, and it would be quite a bit of effort, but once you do it, you'll always have that effect ready to go, in your repertoire.

The same would be if asked to reproduce my animated logo in AE or Premiere.

When you want something specific, it's more work. When you want something "similar to", it's easier. Certainly the viewer of your video is not going to compare whatever you do, so long as what you do works well.

[AjnabiZ]

I see you have champagne tastes, but does stuff like that work for a lecture? Don't make the mistake of showcasing yourself too much

Actually, you CAN do this in Vegas, but it requires mentally deconstructing the effect first, and it would be quite a bit of effort, but once you do it, you'll always have that effect ready to go, in your repertoire.

What did you mean by

I see you have champagne tastes,

Yes, for the kind of lecture we will be recording it would be perfect fit.

It will be series of lectures, the teacher has plans for 2 topics and 1 of those would run for a couple of years, if not an year.

[budwzr]

What I mean is, you want a high level eye-candy animation for seemingly simple content.

As you say it would be a perfect fit, I must have visualized the video wrong. You mentioned a speaker sitting and a fixed camera.

An intro like your examples suggest "Prepare to be dazzled".

[poisondeathray]

Well he didn't say what kind of lecture this was for, he just said it would be a "perfect fit".... Maybe it was a lecture on After Effects

For this type of animation you need a particle generator. Although you can do it with AE's internal particle generator plugins, all those projects you listed require Trapcode Particular (3rd party plugin). It's easily the best particle generator plugin for AE

Those pre-made projects are quite inexpensive, and I have nothing against supporting those artists; but be aware you can do this yourself quite easily. There are plenty of free tutorials that show you how to do this

eg.
http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/videos/redgianttv/item/22/


Although you can achieve similar results with other programs, some things like this are much much easier to do in AE - minutes instead of hours or days.

Use the right tool for the job. You wouldn't use a screwdriver to hammer a nail in. Vegas is an editor , and although you can do many effects with it, particle effects aren't it's strong point. It's primarily an non-linear editor

[AjnabiZ]

Well he didn't say what kind of lecture this was for, he just said it would be a "perfect fit".... Maybe it was a lecture on After Effects

For this type of animation you need a particle generator. Although you can do it with AE's internal particle generator plugins, all those projects you listed require Trapcode Particular (3rd party plugin). It's easily the best particle generator plugin for AE

Those pre-made projects are quite inexpensive, and I have nothing against supporting those artists; but be aware you can do this yourself quite easily. There are plenty of free tutorials that show you how to do this

eg.
http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/videos/redgianttv/item/22/


Although you can achieve similar results with other programs, some things like this are much much easier to do in AE - minutes instead of hours or days.

Use the right tool for the job. You wouldn't use a screwdriver to hammer a nail in. Vegas is an editor , and although you can do many effects with it, particle effects aren't it's strong point. It's primarily an non-linear editor

Thanks alot for the tutorial link.

Ill watch it in a few mins, its loading : )

But wouldnt doing it myself require me to dedicate a lot of time learning AE and then coming up how to do it rather than just paying $10 to an artist for his work. That way i can focus on my work which would be recording and editing.

By the way, which tutorial site would get be started from beginner to intermediate level in AE ?

[poisondeathray]

But wouldnt doing it myself require me to dedicate a lot of time learning AE and then coming up how to do it rather than just paying $10 to an artist for his work. That way i can focus on my work which would be recording and editing.

Yes, that's true. $5-10 to save time is very reasonable

By the way, which tutorial site would get be started from beginner to intermediate level in AE ?

Plenty of free tutorial sites. A couple of the popular ones :

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/
http://ae.tutsplus.com/category/tutorials/

[AjnabiZ]

But wouldnt doing it myself require me to dedicate a lot of time learning AE and then coming up how to do it rather than just paying $10 to an artist for his work. That way i can focus on my work which would be recording and editing.

Yes, that's true. $5-10 to save time is very reasonable

By the way, which tutorial site would get be started from beginner to intermediate level in AE ?

Plenty of free tutorial sites. A couple of the popular ones :

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/
http://ae.tutsplus.com/category/tutorials/

Thanks

[budwzr]

There's no free lunch.