Finally found the time to work through their courseware and load the unlimited full demo.
Felt like I'd entered another world (yes, the price of admission is 10x that of Vegas), so many times that over the years working with Vegas and other NLEs I'd thought "if only they did this" and there it was, something that did it. Probably something to do with the sun or the water, Eyeon did start life down here, then moved to Canada.
I haven't a clue how it stacks up against AE or Combustion however now that my brain is tuned to working with Vegas and I find 99% of everything else I look at oddball or difficult to get my brain around I felt right at home with DF.
Even if you'll never be able to afford this product it's still worthwhile working through or just watching some of the courseware, a lot of the methods they use can be done in Vegas, I'm not talking just the basics but rather how they go about getting output that looks better, yes it's way easier in DF, that's what all the dollars pay for, but with a bit of thought you can get Vegas to come close. One of the things though that should make life WAY easier in DF is motion tracking and image stabilisation. Need to rotoscope something that's moving around a lot. Simple. First stabilise it, do the rotoscoping and then apply the tracking path back again to restore the original motion, DF will preserve the whole frame from the stabilisation by wrapping the pixels, no pixels get hurt.
Two things that did stick out relevant to recent discussions.
DF will do GPU renders via OpenGL, however they do point out that the quality is almost always lower than their software renderer, fine for fast preview but not for final output. It does do background rendering, while you think it works!
They use feed forward rendering. In other words FXs in the chain don't feed a rendered frame to the next FX unless they have to, just feed parameters. This means the frame is if possible only rendered once thus minimising quality hits. Also the degree of sub pixel rendering is configurable. Sub pixel rendering helps avoid nasties when pixels are moved around.
Like I said , I have no clue how DF stacks up against the other heavy weights in the compositing world, one thing that is attractive about it is you can go from the video only version to the full blown film version by only throwing money at it, no new tools to learn.
Bob.
Felt like I'd entered another world (yes, the price of admission is 10x that of Vegas), so many times that over the years working with Vegas and other NLEs I'd thought "if only they did this" and there it was, something that did it. Probably something to do with the sun or the water, Eyeon did start life down here, then moved to Canada.
I haven't a clue how it stacks up against AE or Combustion however now that my brain is tuned to working with Vegas and I find 99% of everything else I look at oddball or difficult to get my brain around I felt right at home with DF.
Even if you'll never be able to afford this product it's still worthwhile working through or just watching some of the courseware, a lot of the methods they use can be done in Vegas, I'm not talking just the basics but rather how they go about getting output that looks better, yes it's way easier in DF, that's what all the dollars pay for, but with a bit of thought you can get Vegas to come close. One of the things though that should make life WAY easier in DF is motion tracking and image stabilisation. Need to rotoscope something that's moving around a lot. Simple. First stabilise it, do the rotoscoping and then apply the tracking path back again to restore the original motion, DF will preserve the whole frame from the stabilisation by wrapping the pixels, no pixels get hurt.
Two things that did stick out relevant to recent discussions.
DF will do GPU renders via OpenGL, however they do point out that the quality is almost always lower than their software renderer, fine for fast preview but not for final output. It does do background rendering, while you think it works!
They use feed forward rendering. In other words FXs in the chain don't feed a rendered frame to the next FX unless they have to, just feed parameters. This means the frame is if possible only rendered once thus minimising quality hits. Also the degree of sub pixel rendering is configurable. Sub pixel rendering helps avoid nasties when pixels are moved around.
Like I said , I have no clue how DF stacks up against the other heavy weights in the compositing world, one thing that is attractive about it is you can go from the video only version to the full blown film version by only throwing money at it, no new tools to learn.
Bob.