Hi,

Layers are used in CorelDrw, photoshop, premiere, Vegas, after effects and probably others. It's an interesting way of working with video and photos - it allows a lot of flexibility. One thing that I'm found of is controling opacity so layers directly below show through in a chost (or other) fashion.

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That's compositing, not editing. Blender will work for that.

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Blender does do somethings but it's not After Effects!! It's not really set up to be after effects. I might have mentioned editing but not soley editing. The question is what programs would one like to see ported to Linux - well After Effects is on my list.

I appreciate Blender, would like to learn it more. But I find it interface slightly hard to learn!

Are you saying Blender will change opacity of clips so other clips below will bleed through. I know Blender handles layers. If you have knowledge of tutorial or 'walk through' on this, I would greatly appreiciate. Believe me I would rather not use Windows for the rest of my life!!!

Have you seen the latest U2 advert. for Apple computers. That looks like pure after effects. Using images as masks and filling them with clips.

Thanks for the reply.

No blender is not Ae nor is it intended to be it's more Mari...

If you saw a commercial and Apple was in it it was built on Final Cut which is something I use daily.

Well, I'm not currently doing a lot of compositing these days, but you should give Blender's compositor and sequencer a fair evaluation. You've identified specific requirements, such as "can I change the opacity of clips so that clips below will bleed through", so you're off to a good start.

Here are some things you might want to look at.

Photoshop in Blender: 2 - Transparency
Simple Video Editing with Blender

TLDR: I don't know, but it looks like the answer might be yes.

Okay, thanks I will definately check it out.

Appreciate the links.

thanks again!

Germany Chris,

I know you're right about Final Cut. However After Effects has been running on Macs for a long time. Will Final Cut pro allow one to use After Effects within it's framework. Or is that only in Premier??

R U running Final Cut in Linux!?? R U in Germany, have you seen the advert? I believe its from a cut called 'the miracle of Joey Ramone'.

Anyway I'm sure Final Cut pro was used - Duh (unfortunately I'm not always the sharpest tool in the shed)!!

Thanks for the reply!!

No I use Final Cut on Macs the Adobe suit runs fine on OS X (I also use that) Apple will produce what it can on it's house SW and the creative community is/was not a big fan of the new FCP so Apple needs to show it's worth at every opportunity.

Publisher.Only reason I've kept Windows at all.

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Windows and Mac all use reworked versions of Unix. They both are experts in taking something they got for free, proprietizing it and selling it back to us!! I know Macs are really good and lead the way with computer graphics - but they seem so over priced!!!

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I know, I know. Have looked at open source and current Linux programs, but nothing functions the way Publisher does, at least for my needs. Maybe in the future.

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Except OS X is certified Unix and has been since 10.5 and prior to OS X apple made no pretenses to Unix and Winows is only partially POSIX compatible.

I'll post this again:

FreeBSD is Just OS X Without the Good Bits

This is as much a myth about OS X as about FreeBSD: that OS X is just FreeBSD with a pretty GUI. The two operating systems do share a lot of code, for example most userland utilities and the C library on OS X are derived from FreeBSD versions. Some of this code flow works in the other direction, for example FreeBSD 9.1 and later include a C++ stack and compiler that were originally developed for OS X, with major parts of the work done by Apple employees. Other parts are very different.

The XNU kernel used on OS X includes a few subsystems from (older versions of) FreeBSD, but is mostly an independent implementation. The similarities in the userland, however, make it much easier to port OS X code to FreeBSD than any other system. For example, both libdispatch (Grand Central Dispatch in Apple's marketing) and libc++ were written for OS X and worked on FreeBSD before any other OS.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths

=====

OSX is a better operating system while true doesn't make it better at "graphics" than any other. When that was true Apple had not yet jumped shark and moved to Intel and x86 prior to that Adobe optimized it's software to the Mac platform. Secondly Macs are not all that expensive my Latitude E6500 was more expensive when new than my 17" MacBook Pro, the same is true now find me a computer with the same screen resolution, aspect ratio, and form factor and if youcan find one (you can't) it'll be the same price. Apple doesn't currently and never has partaken in the race to the bottom because it's never sought market share. Apple offers it's vision of a product if you buy into it you buy if you do not that's OK too much the same as Linux.

I know this post seems way out of proportion to yours but there is so much FUD in my terms that mean (F***ing Useless Drivel) about Mac out there that it sorta needs corrected even more after the iJunk was introduced. Way back when when I started with Apple we all sorta got along now it's all zero sum and that's really not cool nor right.

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Well that's a lot of info. I never joined in the FreeBSD thing, I think I did read that Mac acknowledge unix as part of there code. Where I live the Macs are all at least 50% more than Window machines. Plus, (although this has changed -s0me) they were not as easy to build. All this might have changed.

I have found a certain passion among Mac users. Macs to me were sort of like Cadillacs, of the computer world.

You might be right about the price stuff - it is all relative. But for a long time it was just more expensive to own a Mac! Software, hardware all great but hard to get pirated etc.. But most of the big production companies used Mac exclusively for a long time, so that must mean something!!

Germany_chris is perfectly correct, though the whole story is more convoluted than that. OSX originated not directly from BSD, also not solely, and there's no linear ancestry either as it took and gave quite a lot from other things also. Not to mention Apple's open sourced the core of OSX - called Darwin. The rest is still closed source, which includes several libraries as well as their Aqua desktop.

As for being "good at graphics" ... meh, that's because of the software you use, not Apple. It would be like me trying out AutoCAD for OSX and stating OSX is useless since its AutoCAD is so poor in relation to the Windows version - see it's not Apple's "fault" and thus also the converse.

One thing though is that Apple in general has a lot less to worry about driver-wise, since they specify their own hardware. Both Windows and Linux (and also most Unix derivatives like BSD) don't have that luxury, they need to ensure their OSs can run on all major hardware. So in this case Apple "can" be more robust on their "own" hardware since they need less work to do so.

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Maybe it was that pro-tools ran exclusively on Mac for a long time. Probably why so many audio studios used Mac. I accept what was said about graphics. But it seemed like the high end graphic houses used Mac exclusively for a long time too!! I remember some programmers telling me that it was the chip archetecture that made Macs better for music and graphics. From my end it was always build something that comes close!! With Adobe and Calkwalk running in Windows one could 'come close' it seemed. Anyway it's all a matter of 'getting the biggest bang for the buck'.

These insights and bits of knowledge help to connect some of the dots.....

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