2013 - Year of Node Base Workflows - hints for nodal newbs ?

[Mike Harrington]

dont get me wrong, I absolutely agree on the flexibility of nodes vs. comps/layers. this is why I got into nuke. keying, retiming, denoising, tracking, etc, I do all those things in nuke. however, for "quick" stuff, plain 2D, I'd say you're still faster in AE. which is why I want to keep using both. maybe I'll change my mind in a year's time with more experience.
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Totally agree...I use AE 80% of the time for quick and dirty....If I have to do something complicated.....then out comes Fusion...

Side note.....AE would totally suck without the hundreds of plugins it has incorporated through the years

 

[Mike Harrington]

One of my favorite things with nodes is "copy/paste", what I do is take a nice looking outlined graph like what Mike did ... and just copy/paste nodes for new scenes/composites. I also do this with all my classes on nuke, i just copy/paste nodes from a class to current work i'm doing - to get me started on something. The ability to copy/paste to email and forums also I think makes the nuke forum one of the most "work" useful, in that if someone has a problem they just past the nodes into the post and it allows others to see what they are doing and propose changes. The graph views also help groups of people to work, share and understand what others are doing quickly. I think how nodes work with teams of people is probably one of their best strengths.

I think for teams, its the only way to go....the only way to stay organised in AE is strong naming conventions

My own comps in AE usually end up like comp/precomp/pre-precomp/pre-pre-precomp :cursing: