Blender VS. After Effects VS. Fusion: VFX Compositor Comparison

Hey Everyone. In this video I compare three common visual effects compositors; Blackmagic Fusion, Blender 3d's node based compositor, and Adobe After Effects. I compare the pro's and cons of each software and share some functionality differences between node and layer based VFX workflows. Maybe next time I will include The Foundry's NUKE in the lineup. Enjoy and let us know what kind of VFX tutorials or breakdowns you would like to see next on the channel!

Our Blender Add-ons:

[LightArchitect]

Hey Everyone. In this video I compare three common visual effects compositors; Blackmagic Fusion, Blender 3d's node based compositor, and Adobe After Effects. Let us know what kind of VFX tutorials or breakdowns you would like to see next on the channel!
Our Blender Add-ons:

[moinm]

I'm getting started in AE and have a little experience of working in Fusion as I started editing videos in Davinci. I always thought Fusion wasn't that great because it came bundled and AE would be superior. This video changed my perspective, thanks!

[chalexdark]

i don t think After effect is faster than Fusion ( or Nuke ), it's more fast in your example because you have After effect in 8bit and fusion in 32bit float.

[SteveWarner]

Terrific overview. Blender's compositor gets a lot of hate from Nuke users. I personally love it. We did a film last year and brought in former ILM nuke artists for the comp work. Blender EXR files with cryptomatte worked flawlessly in Blender and Natron, but failed to work in Nuke. Very frustrating. I ended up doing the comp for the most complicated shot in Blender because it was easier to get the shot done there than Nuke. Fusion is a step up from Blender, and having Fusion Reactor expands the toolset nicely. I don't like that you can't see the inputs/outputs on the Fusion nodes like you can in Blender. Bringing in a multi-layer EXR into Blender makes it easy to see what channels are available. Not so in Nuke, Natron or Fusion. I also don't like that so many things are hidden in Fusion behind a right click in some obscure part of the interface. But its tight integration into Resolve makes Fusion a really natural choice for post work on films.

[rano]

Btw you can click on any node and press 1/2 to preview them on the first or second view or you can click and flick to preview it as well.

[cinema]

Very helpful overview and comparison. Not many of these comparison videos but very helpful for those of us who use one or the other and, from time to time, wonder about the current sets of features or a performance comparison. Your landscape of these, especially using a single project done in each, makes the important visual comparison also easy to grasp. Thanks.

[rano]

Personally, I wouldn't say it's a con to have the node properties on a different windows, among all the software I think only blender has info on the node, so yeah and also I don't think previewing in fusion is slow, AE by default works with 8 bit but fusion works with 32 bit float.

[AlexPearced]

Thanks for sharing! I have been using Fusion and in general love it. Look forward to seeing your next videos, thanks for ypur work

[snofixart]

Blender is getting a realtime compositor in next update and hopefully in coming updates there will be features to hand animate stuff.

[peterkertesz]

Hello! What would make 'previewing slower' in fusion?

[CoreyMcKinneyJr]

Have you tried Blender 4.2 yet? the compositor is now GPU accelerated.

[TomSidProductions]

In response to the Fusion playback,

Fusion has auto proxy and render caching for nodes. Thisb speeds up performance. Also you want to disable HQ and MB for better playback.

Fusion studio has these settings as clearly visible togglable buttons.
But in fusion page, it is hidden behind a right click menu.

[steelstudios-vfx]

Have you used davinci resolve? If so, would you say it is a good way to prepare for nuke. ( when it comes to compositing)

[pipeliner]

Cntrl, shift + click will Solo your node in Blender

[WeareVRMUSIC]

Blender and Fusion works fine for me! But the exr exports from blender are not accurate. Often wrong Color space! 🤔Png works! Can somebody help?

[Mirco.Iannelli]

Hey man Thnks for this! are you planning to create some video tutorial about Fusion in the future?

[dartmaker]

What should I learn? After effects or fusion? Which is best. Please somebody tell me 🙏

[carlosedubarreto]

Certainly, it was useful, I was thinking about moving to Fusion or maybe hitfilm for compositing.
Thanks a lot for this video.

[xanzuls]

Among the 3 I use fusion primarily, I started with AE and then moved to Fusion, it's the best middle ground because it has better mograph tools than Nuke and not $10k and it has a better workflow than AE for VFX because its node based, now that I'm used to node-based workflow, I can't go back lol. Layers seem like a waste of time to me now. I even do my photoshop in Fusion because it's so flexible. Also were you using resolve 15? I think you should use the latest version as there have been many updates to resolve and fusion.

[pipeliner]

Did you ever try Natron, the free and open source compositor?