Category: Software

Editing and Compositing Software

October 7, 2013
2 Comments on Editing and Compositing Software

My goal for the week was to evaluate several compositing/editing software packages and decide which would best fit my needs. I looked at Sony Vegas, Blender 3D, and Lightworks. (I ignored Adobe Premiere because I do not want to pay $20-$50 per month to rent software).

If you do not care about the individual results for each software package, feel free to skip to the results in the last section below.

How I Tested The Software

Full Lightwave test render
An example render from the test scene after compositing all layers together.

I created a simple 1 second (24 frames) scene in LightWave at 720p and rendered out a series of PNG files. For each frame, I rendered out 2 layers — one for a foreground object and another for the midground objects. I also had a simple static background image to composite behind the scene. Finally, I also included additional channel renders, such as depth, specular, and transparency, to use for additional compositing testing.

Continue reading “Editing and Compositing Software”

Goals for the week

September 27, 2013
Comment

Life has settled down a bit for me and I can focus on my LightWave hobby again. I played around with the software a bit this past week and re-familiarized myself with the modeling and basic layout tools.

One of the main reasons for starting this site is to document and track my goals related to LightWave. Now that I feel comfortable using the software again, I want to start setting some short-term and long-term goals for myself.

In the very short-term, my goals are simple:

  • Figure out my long-term goals and deadlines and post them to this site (deadline: Oct 6)
  • Evaluate different compositing and non-linear editing (NLE) software to find a pipeline that works best for me (deadline: Oct 6)

I have used Sony Vegas in the past for both compositing and NLE, but it’s been so long that the last version I used was 6.0 (the current version is 12). After doing some initial research, I have found three different products to evaluate:

I am going to evaluate each product separately as a compositor and an editor, which means I may decide to use a different program for each function. However, my goal is to only spend money on one product (which ultimately means that I will not use Vegas as a compositor and Lightworks as an editor, which I believe is the only combination that would force me to pay for two products).