Mac Animation Software ??? Some Advice Would Be Much Appreciated... Similar To 'Year Walk'

Wazmeister · October 2020

Anyone know the best software to make something like this below ?

Would it be Final Cut Pro ? Or any others ?

octatonic · October 2020

Adobe After Effects.

FCP is really a video editor like Premiere.

WiresDreamDisasters · October 2020

You could do a lot of what is going on there inside Blender. And it's free and open source.

But there's a boatload of talent in even doing a short video like that. Not for the faint of heart Waz!

Wazmeister · October 2020

WiresDreamDisasters said:

You could do a lot of what is going on there inside Blender. And it's free and open source.

But there's a boatload of talent in even doing a short video like that. Not for the faint of heart Waz!

octatonic said:

Adobe After Effects.

FCP is really a video editor like Premiere.

Thanks boys, I’ll look into it.

Appreciate your help

stratology · October 2020

octatonic said:

Adobe After Effects.

FCP is really a video editor like Premiere.

Not sure if After Effects is the best option for that type of animation, but Apple Motion does the same as After Effects, at a much lower price.

The main difference between FCP and Premiere is that you get better performance with FCP on a Mac. These days, Adobe is always a few years behind when it comes to keeping up with under-the-hood improvements in macOS.

Also: free updates for many years on FCP, Motion, Logic, MainStage etc., and seamless integration between the apps.

Stratavarious · October 2020

Yep... a choice between Adobe Creative suite - photoshop, afterfx and premiere or FCP / Motion.

Go with Adobe Suite for PC and Final Cut/Motion for Mac. I would say some photoshop/illustrator has featured in that to work the look of it.

i use FCP but I am working with a tv production team doing stuff like this and they are all on Adobe. They split the drawing, animation and final editing They all went to arts Uni to get a handle on it. Expect to invest time... but either of those are used by many professionals and there are lots of tutorials if learning skills in lockdown.

Grangousier · October 2020

That video immediately made me think of After Effects as the likely creation tool - solid keyframed animations, but you can do camera tricks with it, and layered .

(There's also Animate, the application formerly known as Flash, which works in a similar way to After Effects, but is vector-based)

You'd need Photoshop/Gimp to prepare the images. You can do simple animations in Photoshop, but with enormous limitations - for example, it's straightforward to animate movement - left-right, up-down - and scaling, but rotation requires a tedious hack (you need to make a new layer for each frame of the rotation). I use it to create visualisations of simple novelty books sometimes, but I'd much rather spend the time to work out how to do it in Blender (though I find that having all these guitars lying around is too much of a distraction and I never quite get around to it).

Blender is fantastically powerful and you can do almost anything with it and it is, yes, free, but very complicated - it has improved a lot in the useability department, but it's still mad. I'm not sure that the linked animation is a common use case for it (mostly it's used for CGI/games, but it has recently included a powerful 2d animation layer, and it's also possible to do video composition. As it's created by an army of enthusiasts, there's a tendency to include everything). To do that sort of thing you'd probably need to repurpose techniques used for something else (for example, the characters and trees as objects arranged in front of the camera like cardboard cut-outs) Download it for free, though, to have a look, and there are lots of explainer videos on YouTube (though invariably for quite different use cases).

I like Motion a lot (though I've not used it for a while), but it's best used for motion graphics - idents and that sort of thing. Although it can be used for character animation, you'd need to repurpose it slightly as with Blender.

There's all sorts of other applications that can do animation, but those are the most famous, I think.

Premiere and Final Cut Pro X are video editing tools - personally I prefer FCPX - so you'd need to prepare footage, whether shot or animated, elsewhere and import them.

WiresDreamDisasters · October 2020

@Grangousier ;
Checkout Blender 2.8 and now 2.9. The grease pencil has been turned into a fully fledged art tool, and with all of the shape key groups and keyframing features, you can literally do anything you want. I'm amazed by it. I'm using it for 3D, but have watched lots of tutorials by people using it for 2D work.

The parallax stuff in the OP's video would be straight forward. The camera object supports all manner of depth of field settings and lens settings.

But you're right - it's not a simple app to use!

lukedlb · October 2020

What about animation on top of video? What step is required inside the video editing software? I personally use Resolve (still an amateur). Should I be aware of an animation software that integrates better? Or is it simply a case of eliminating the background behind the animation?

WiresDreamDisasters · October 2020

lukedlb said:

What about animation on top of video? What step is required inside the video editing software? I personally use Resolve (still an amateur). Should I be aware of an animation software that integrates better? Or is it simply a case of eliminating the background behind the animation?

Well both would be exported as video, ideally. Then composited in an editor. One with a transparent background - your animation on it's own layer - and then the video you want it to sit on top of.

soma1975 · October 2020

Almost certainly that video was produced in After Effects.

@lukedlb Fusion is now part of Resolve and would give you the tools to do all manner of animation work from right within your existing software package. If you are starting from scratch you may as well use the software you have even if AE might be more of an industry standard for 2D animation and motion graphics.

As mentioned above motion graphics work tends to be rendered with an alpha channel to preserve transparency and allow compositing with other source material.

The bits of comped animation here on my old reel at 39 secs and 1min28secs were composited with After Effects.

lukedlb · October 2020

Top showreel @soma1975 , Ben. Lovely colours. I’ve been avoiding the Fusion tab. Resolve has quite a lot to get my head round. Good to know what it does for when the time comes.

soma1975 · October 2020

Fusion used to be an expensive standalone broadcast graphics suite so the fact you have access to it as part of resolve is ace. Or ACES if you like awful colour grading puns.

Thanks re reel. SO bored of not being able to go out and shoot stuff.

Wazmeister · October 2020

So, to begin with, which is the easiest to use ?

I am very Mac literate but have no idea about this software.

soma1975 · October 2020

Starting at the beginning, before discussing software packages, do you actually already possess animation/design skills?

There is many many years of experience and a lot of different techniques in that piece posted in the OP. Although it's not my bread and butter, I have worked with motion graphics and AE for many many years in a professional capacity and 'know the buttons' as it were but still would not dream of being on a level to produce that sort of work.

The simplest analogy I can think of is a beginner asking which guitar is best for playing Racer X technical Difficulties on. As in, the answer doesn't really matter if you can't already kind of play Technical Difficulties.

But yeah the answer is After Effects and some nice plugins. But Fusion you can use for free.

JezWynd · October 2020

Wazmeister said:

So, to begin with, which is the easiest to use ?

I am very Mac literate but have no idea about this software.

After Effects is Photoshop with animation, so if you are Photoshop literate you are halfway there. You can import a layered Photoshop doc into AE and then animate each layer separately.
The compositing of the video was likely done in AE but some of the images look vector, so sources could have been prepared in Illustrator or perhaps Flash. The whole thing could have been done in Flash I believe, but I’m out of that world for a few years now and I think Flash has lost ground.

Wazmeister · October 2020

A big thanks for all the advice...

It looks like Motion for me to begin with.

Appreciate all the input

@JezWynd
@Soma1975
@WiresDreamDisasters
@octatonic ;;
@@stratology ;;
@Stratavarious ;;
@@Grangousier ;;

WiresDreamDisasters · October 2020

No probs - let us know how you get on!

Wazmeister · October 2022

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Mac Animation Software ??? Some Advice Would Be Much Appreciated... Similar To 'Year Walk'

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