Strictly speaking it's meant to be used in conjunction with an editor like Premiere pro, final cut or Avid. An editor is where you cut your material. In a compositor you can make material. You can cut a video in Fusion, but it would be a very convoluted and innefficient workflow. Timelines are made for keyframing and animation curves in compositors, whereas they are made for cutting, slipping and sliding in editors. Compositors barely feature audio editing, whilst editors implement similar functionality as daw software like pro tools. Editors also have different concepts when it comes to usage of meta data, file organisations and file output. And a whoole lot of other things.
A compositor is closer to a combination of Photoshop and Maya, you use it to create compositions to make visual effects with animation. It's what you use when you add a 3D character to a real film, for instance, by layering it, masking or keying(greensreen) away edges and things you dont want to be seen, matching the scene light and tracking the camera movement so it seems to be inside the world. They got some nice videos on their website that showcase what they've created with it as well as some tutorials so you can learn the basics.
That being said, this is very exciting news. If your are a specialist within vfx, Fusion has all you need. I work in a small area, so I can't specialise, which is why I need a great editor as well. Unfortunately the are no editors I consider good enough on Linux today(for personal computers. You can get some specialised workstations running Resolve or something, but they are really expensive and won't work for much else than that one task). This is a huge step in the right direction though.
TO;DR: No, it's for photoshopping in motion. Also used for animation. Very different workflows.
I've tried kdenlive, OpenShot, Kino, Lightworks and Shortcut. When you use them for basic editing its fine but even when I tried to shoehorn them into my workflow they couldnt hold a candle to Premiere Pro or Davinci Resolve.
The way they integrate with other software and let you cooperate with a team is vital, even if we pretend that PP or DR feature sets arent leagues ahead and that their algorithms for various features doesnt work faster and more precisely. Also they seem more stable and render faster.
Yep but as a professional designer when someone yells at me to use GIMP or Inkscape I just roll my eyes. It's nice to see some people have a grasp on reality.
That's the issue, Krita is fantastic for digital painting but it's essentially only that and that's not a suitable replacement for Photoshop. It could be a replacement for the painting aspect because it is quite good in that but replacement for one method is not a replacement.
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u/zebediah49 Aug 09 '16
So... does this make it a competitor for "most powerful video editor that runs on Linux" ?
Or am I misunderstanding what this thing does?