Hey,

what's your opinion for post work on a budget?

MAMBA

http://www.sgo.es/2014/07/sgo-releases-mamba-fx-version-2-0/ [sgo.es]

NATRON

https://natron.inria.fr [natron.inria.fr]

FUSION

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/in/products/fusion/training [blackmagicdesign.com]

HITFILM

www.hitfilm.com

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ADDED LATER - BLENDER COMPOSITOR

http://www.wikihow.com/Use-the-Compositor-in-Blender [wikihow.com]

I would go for Fusion.
There is plenty of tutorials out there, production proven, stable, good 3D pipeline tools, good particles and its completely free.

I prefer Nuke but fusion is a good second.

øyvind Fiksdal
I would go for Fusion.
There is plenty of tutorials out there, production proven, stable, good 3D pipeline tools, good particles and its completely free.

I prefer Nuke but fusion is a good second.

thanks for your opinion, øyvind Fiksdal - I agree with all you say.


PS - Blender compositor should probably be included to the list , too.

fusion have a free version that's very nice, before even going the route of nuke natron is EXTREMLY powerfull, doesn't have all the node and plugings that nuke have, don't forget how much time one has been in development as the other.

and more important, what are your needs? do you need all those nodes? are you willing to pay that money for some of them you might not use?

Gotta say Natron is pretty impressive. It's getting better and better quickly, cross platform, and they have snapshots triggered within a few hours after each code submit.

Natron is cross-platform and open source and Fusion is not. Fusion has been in the market for a long time but Natron is new. It would be expected that Fusion to be more feature rich and Natron to be missing a few things here and there (like roto paint node). However from my perspective Natron is a fantastic tool being multi platform, open source and also has a very similar UI to Nuke. That being said it's best if you decided according to your requirements. Fusion might be a better choice now but I believe Natron has a bright future.

There is open source and freely available nodebased compositing and no one tells me that?!
Thanks for this thread. The installation runs in this very moment

“There is open source and freely available nodebased compositing ”
and is freaking good…

Depends on your needs and platform.

Mamba has some amazing color correction features, but it's background is in editing and conforming and it shows. If you want to assemble multi-pass renders and integrate them into footage, it might not be the best. I would say it's more of an editor's compositing package, rather than a TD's one. 3D space features are weak (cards in 3D space)

Fusion is very powerful and full featured. Mature, tested, has everything. Good animation features, full toolset, great 3D features (for geometry importing, working with projections etc), good paint etc. This is what we're using. Windows only, Mac is said to be coming.

Natron: looks impressive for what it is. Toolset is much weaker than Fusion. Has no 3D space which is a big drawback. I personally dislike a lot their choice of basically copying Nuke in everything (look, workflow etc).

IMO, for real production right now, Fusion can't be beat. Natron looks interesting for the future.

I am quite impressed with Fusion7 but the fact that there is no OSX version is a real downer. I love the OpenGL rendering, why doesn't After Effects have this. Adobe tried back in version 7 but then just gave up and no one seemed to care.

Blender's compositor is not really up to the task yet. They still have the sequencer separated from the compositor and the only communication between the two is your disk drive. Very clunky workflow.

I working with Nuke , But I think Fusion is cool , some of my friends working with it and they are so happy for it.

But I'm sure you should switch ti Nuke finally , of course for VFX .

So I suggest you to select each one that is more similarity to Nuke .

I think a good Compositing Software for Visual Effects should has these features : (Of course in my opinion)

1. Full Node-Base workflow (most important)
2. Deep Support
3. 3D Compositing possibility
4. Using minimum memory for slower hardware
5. Supporting Python Scripting Languages (Because it usefull in other softwares such as Maya , Houdini too )
6. Fast for reading , loading files , for example file's size for Nuke projects is so less , So we can open and load them very fast )
7. has complete and too many libraries and Plug-Ins
8. Good integration with 3D softwares
9. Perfectly learning and Tutorials database
10. It's should using in the big companies (for Jobs)
11. perfect 3D/2D Tracking Tools
13.Perfect Chroma Key tools (such as Keylight and Primate)
14. Perfect Support from it's company and team and perfectly forum for solving user's problem
15. Supporting Rendering Engines directly on it !
16. Hmmmmmm , I don't know !