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After Effects even allows users to easily add 3D titles. After Effects is known to contain many great title effects and plugins. But anything more than that, head to After Effects for a complete suite of complex compositing tools and features. If you’re looking for single-shot composition, Davinci Fusion might be the program for you. This allows complex programs like After Effects to actually be easier to use for newer compositors. Because of its foreign appearing node-based compositing layout, Fusion detracts from many new users and confuses less experienced users. Therefore, After Effects has a much higher quality and higher quantity of available third-party plugins. This results in more users demanding more plugins and more users able to produce these plugins. The user base of After Effects is so much greater than that of Fusion. While this can be powerful for some, it is often confusing to more. While After Effects uses the more standard layered timeline, Fusion uses a node-based compositing design to its layout. The interfaces of After Effects and Fusion are probably the great dividers between the two platforms. We say “mostly” because the video editing platform does occasionally have an effect on the video compositing program. That being said, we will tackle DaVinci’s Fusion and Adobe’s After Effects mostly independently of its video editing platform. Related: Premiere Pro vs DaVinci Resolve: The Ultimate Battle (2023)
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While these can be swapped around amongst each other, pricing and seamless compatibility have made users primarily stick with the video compositing platform that is married to the video editing platform. For example, Apple’s Final Cut Pro has Apple Motion, Adobe Premiere Pro has After Effects and DaVinci Resolve has DaVinci Fusion. Generally speaking, each video editing platform will have a video compositing platform married to it. Here you will do things like adding advanced titles with motion, animation, blur effects, particle effects, and 3D motion graphics. With video compositing, you generally manipulate the video clips that have already been edited in a video editing platform. Video compositing software is different from video editing software.
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