Comment by Uehreka
7 hours ago
> (as a hobbyist who likes cooking up some vis for my DJ sets)
I generally get really annoyed when I hear someone say that a particular piece of open-source or free-as-in-beer software “blows After Effects out of the water”[0], but not here: I appreciate you describing your use case so people have the right expectations going in. It sounds like this is more trying to compete with offerings like Touch Designer or Resolume than AE, which feels like a space with much more opportunity for disruption (without having a huge full-time team working for years in obscurity).
[0] I want someone to do to After Effects what Blender is doing to Cinema4D and Maya (provide a competitive free alternative to people who don’t need corporate deals and support plans). Every piece of software that people usually mention falls short in huge ways. I think a lot of people get into this space not realizing how difficult it is just to have a real-time scrubbable timeline that intelligently caches intermediate steps to disk and can render at lower resolutions to save time. So many alternatives absolutely chug once you have 10 1080p tracks with mattes and different effects. And then you’ve got color space transforms and all the different HDR things and a million other features that users of After Effects often forget are features.
> I generally get really annoyed when I hear someone say that a particular piece of open-source or free-as-in-beer software “blows After Effects out of the water”[0], but not here
It bothered me because the phrase suggests a favorable comparison to After Effects, when in fact After Effects really isn't the right tool for a job that needs real-time motion graphics. It's like saying Inkscape blows VS Code out of the water, for drawing SVGs.
So… not After Effects :P
Blender itself will grow into the After Effects space. It's doing so very slowly, but very definitely.
I want this to happen, but this past month I tried using Blender’s Video Editor (after hearing the great news about Compositor Modifiers) and boy oh boy does it chug. Apparently Compositor Modifiers only run on the CPU, so trying to apply them to a track of 1080p footage totally locked up my Ryzen 7950X and froze the UI for a few minutes while it tried to render the preview.
I’m hoping GPU Compositor Modifiers aren’t too much of a lift, but at the moment they’re not actively being worked on (and I don’t have the expertise to do it myself) so I’d guess it’s at least about a year before this feature becomes usable for anything beyond really simple compositing with super-crunchy proxies.
Maybe Blender 6.
As someone who's been looking to get into video creation and motion graphics as a hobby, usually people recommend davinci resolve as an alternative. Which, apart from enshittifying and not being open source, the motion graphics part seems like a bit of an afterthought.
I’ve gotten so frustrated with AE the past couple years that my New Year’s resolution is to bite the bullet and try Resolve for my next couple projects. I’m even willing to splurge for the license if it means I can stop paying Adobe every month. I’m in a place where I definitely need a lot of AE’s pro features and performance, but I’m not locked into the plugin ecosystem, so I have a bit more flexibility than some other people.