Fusion 7

Fusion 7

For those users who have Windows machines (or dual boot their Mac's) Black Magic Design is giving Fusion 7 away for free!

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion

Fusion is a node based compositing software with tons of professional users. The full suite, with advanced stereo workflows and collaboration features is $995.oo. The basic version has more than most of us will ever need. Also, given Black Magic Designs company history, a Macintosh version will most certainly come at some point.

Fusion 8 has a Mac beta available. It is free and you can import 3d objects. Looks like a great solution for those who don't have After Effects + Element 3D or wish to cleave themselves away from the Adobe cartel.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion

I also just became aware of another new free open source compositor called Natron. It is a node based compositor and appears to be like a free version of Nuke.

http://natron.fr

Apparently it's not just the beta that's free. The non-studio version of the product is free, and it appears to basically be feature-equivalent to After Effects (and then some) complete with 3D rendering. The only things you miss out on by not paying the (quite reasonable if it's as good as it looks) $995 is studio management features, network rendering, plugin support, stereoscopic features, and "optical flow analysis"*

* This appears to be a system for creating missing frames when up-sampling the frame rate, e.g. playing a source video at 25% speed it can (apparently) infer the missing frames, which is kind of awesome.

Downloading now ;-)