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Professional motion designer here (15 years): Blender is awesome and I highly applaud their team (and have donated to the org!), but it is absolutely not a repl

Professional motion designer here (15 years): Blender is awesome and I highly applaud their team (and have donated to the org!), but it is absolutely not a replacement for After Effects. The ecosystem around AE (plugins/tutorials/templates) is way too large and useful to disregard. And don't get me wrong, After Effects has serious issues and I often long for an alternative. I get why hobbyists don't like subscription models, but the cost of Creative Cloud is pretty negligible for a professional using it daily to feed his family.

robenkleene 2y ago
None of the examples the parent gave are even in the same plane of existence as actually replacing Adobe products in a professional context. (Blender has decent inroads in indie game development, and marginal inroads in other 3D contexts, e.g., as a C4D alternative, the rest are so irrelevant they might as well not exist.)
- atoav 2y ago
  None? So you are a professional Colorist using Premiere and Lumetri? /s As I said, I ordered them by their ability to replace the prospect tools for me. I edited films for hours in Premiere, recently all I had was my linkux machine and kdenlive worked surprisingly well for a small project, not to speak of Davinci. Blender supported my freelance career for at least the past 5 years and half of the projects would have been considered 2D. "Wow, how did you achive that look?" is a question I heard more than once. So yeah, if a piece of software manages to cover my rent I consider it good enough. And as for AE: with Davinci and Blender the numer of times I had to reach for AE slowly aproached zero. But again depends on your Blender skills and what you need done.
  - robenkleene 2y ago
    > None? So you are a professional Colorist using Premiere and Lumetri? /s Sorry, missed you included Resolve in there, although Resolve's actual market penetration in as an NLE (i.e., directly competing with Premiere) is hard to evaluate (it's obviously the market leader for color grading). Prosumers love it as an NLE though. Your follow up comments put things in a different context and I wouldn't have replied the way I did if I had read them first. E.g., in the follow-ups you're stating you've managed to replace your workflow in these areas with these applications, which is great and useful information. But that's a different framing than the original comment I was responding to, e.g., "Creative Cloud products which can now be replaced:". > So yeah, if a piece of software manages to cover my rent I consider it good enough. My metric would be if people are choosing it for reasons other than price conscious or for values (i.e., it's better than the closed-source version because it's a better product not just inherently better for being open source). Not the easiest to evaluate, but that's what I'm looking for for evidence of the quality of these applications.
    - atoav 2y ago
      I happen to teach in a university with time based media and film departments and I can assure you that among the next generation we have reached 50/50 Premiere/Davinci as NLE. I try to do one small editing project per year in Davinci and while Premiere is still better with material-intensive projects, davinci is is totally usable and comes with its own upsides. And thry have improved gradualy throughout the past years, so I expect them to catch up there. As for Blender, I was a Maya user before and never really looked back. Blender is also gaining a lot of traction in the recent years, especially since they introduced the Eevee renderer and decent grease pencil/2D animation workflows. I can't speak for all segments of the professional market, but Blender is good enough to earn a living with it, while not feeling you are trying to paint the Mona Lisa in paint, as of now. And more importantly: it is improving at a quicker pace than most other software and that includes commercial ones.
atoav 2y ago
I said that because it replaced AE in my own professional work, which includes motion graphics and VFX work for nearly a decade as well. Maybe it depends on your specific niche, but the number of jobs where I had to use AE has been zero for the past 3 years. Blender is known as a modelling or 3D-VFX/Animation tool, but if you are good at it, with all its constraints, python support etc. it is truly worth trying for 2D as well. Tracker is better as well.

robenkleene 2y ago

None of the examples the parent gave are even in the same plane of existence as actually replacing Adobe products in a professional context. (Blender has decent inroads in indie game development, and marginal inroads in other 3D contexts, e.g., as a C4D alternative, the rest are so irrelevant they might as well not exist.)

atoav 2y ago
None? So you are a professional Colorist using Premiere and Lumetri? /s As I said, I ordered them by their ability to replace the prospect tools for me. I edited films for hours in Premiere, recently all I had was my linkux machine and kdenlive worked surprisingly well for a small project, not to speak of Davinci. Blender supported my freelance career for at least the past 5 years and half of the projects would have been considered 2D. "Wow, how did you achive that look?" is a question I heard more than once. So yeah, if a piece of software manages to cover my rent I consider it good enough. And as for AE: with Davinci and Blender the numer of times I had to reach for AE slowly aproached zero. But again depends on your Blender skills and what you need done.
- robenkleene 2y ago
  > None? So you are a professional Colorist using Premiere and Lumetri? /s Sorry, missed you included Resolve in there, although Resolve's actual market penetration in as an NLE (i.e., directly competing with Premiere) is hard to evaluate (it's obviously the market leader for color grading). Prosumers love it as an NLE though. Your follow up comments put things in a different context and I wouldn't have replied the way I did if I had read them first. E.g., in the follow-ups you're stating you've managed to replace your workflow in these areas with these applications, which is great and useful information. But that's a different framing than the original comment I was responding to, e.g., "Creative Cloud products which can now be replaced:". > So yeah, if a piece of software manages to cover my rent I consider it good enough. My metric would be if people are choosing it for reasons other than price conscious or for values (i.e., it's better than the closed-source version because it's a better product not just inherently better for being open source). Not the easiest to evaluate, but that's what I'm looking for for evidence of the quality of these applications.
  - atoav 2y ago
    I happen to teach in a university with time based media and film departments and I can assure you that among the next generation we have reached 50/50 Premiere/Davinci as NLE. I try to do one small editing project per year in Davinci and while Premiere is still better with material-intensive projects, davinci is is totally usable and comes with its own upsides. And thry have improved gradualy throughout the past years, so I expect them to catch up there. As for Blender, I was a Maya user before and never really looked back. Blender is also gaining a lot of traction in the recent years, especially since they introduced the Eevee renderer and decent grease pencil/2D animation workflows. I can't speak for all segments of the professional market, but Blender is good enough to earn a living with it, while not feeling you are trying to paint the Mona Lisa in paint, as of now. And more importantly: it is improving at a quicker pace than most other software and that includes commercial ones.

atoav 2y ago

I said that because it replaced AE in my own professional work, which includes motion graphics and VFX work for nearly a decade as well. Maybe it depends on your specific niche, but the number of jobs where I had to use AE has been zero for the past 3 years. Blender is known as a modelling or 3D-VFX/Animation tool, but if you are good at it, with all its constraints, python support etc. it is truly worth trying for 2D as well. Tracker is better as well.