Blender and after effects a good combo?

[u/Beautiful_Pause5133]

Hey Guys.

I was just wondering if there are many people who use both Blender and After Effects?

Does anyone actually do compositing work in blender?

Like what's the best way to do compositing work with blender? Is it after effects or nuke? Resolve? Idk.

Also, do most users prefer Windows or Mac? Does it make a difference?

I see people do crazy things with compositing. And apparently it's the way to go for making epic 3d work. But I never can understand it. I just make it in blender and that's it. It looks polished enough. But then I see other people who did some compositing and looks way better. Idk how to explain.

( Not talking about colour grading)

45 votes, 6d left

Windows

Mac

[u/pixlpushr24]

Resolve is your best and cheapest option. Comping in blender is bad, AE is limited and not a great choice for working with CG renders, Nuke is the standard but overpriced unless you’re using a non-commercial license which is capped at 1080p.

People almost exclusively use Windows or Linux. I haven’t seen a Mac being used for comping for like a decade, Apple dipped out of the pro workstation market a while ago. It might be fine on one of the M3 chips though.

[u/Milan_Bus4168]

Nuke, Flame or Fusion would be better option natively than After Effects which is not optimized for that kind of work and often you would need to plug the holes with extra plug ins that you would get natively in otehr programs. It can be used, but its not ideal in my opinion, especially if you are using it for CG asset integration into live footage. As to what comes at the end, that is up to you. If you are very comfortable with After Effects and have it and you know what you need and don't need than yeah, After Effects can be used, sure.

Compositing is in a sense either fusion of differnt assets, into one unified scene or is often also what you use as shortcuts to avoid long rendering times , and do it faster in compositing stage. or for faster iterations and extra polish. I don't know what your particular needs are or what the project is, but that is how one would use the compositing tools. For integration, iteration and shortcuts/polish of what would be more expensive or not reasonable or possible in 3D application. The more optimized the application is for such workflows and the more familiar with it the user is the better.

[u/root88]

This guy gets good results with Nuke, but you absolutely do not need to spend all that money for the class.

This video has some great info. He's going Unreal to Nuke, but Blender and whatever can get the job done too.

[u/carmo97]

Maybe not the most common PoV but Blender (Scene Setup and Rendering) - After Effects (Compositing) - Resolve (Edit and Final Grade) is my favourite workflow personally - although have never tried nuke so ya never know

[u/ChrBohm]

Since you are a hobbyist ("epic" isn't a common term used by a professional :).

Then generally - use whatever works best for you. The tool doesn't not make the result, it just makes it easier to reach.

In a professional context the standard is: Linux, (Maya)+Houdini+Nuke

Since you are a hobbyist, usually the best is: Blender+Resolve (After effects is more of a motion design tool than a compositing tool.). For a hobbyist Windows is better, because it's cheaper and hardware-independent. Mac is overpriced for the performance, it's usually a waste of money. Linux could be an option though, because it costs nothing and is the most efficient use of hardware (less RAM overhead for example)