LOL I feel like there’s rumors. Like the filtering hit stuff that can be easily avoided… but on this I’m not 100% sure. My scientific methods were… less than scientific. But, if a comp node is not faster than an action AND you don’t take a filtering hit by using action- I feel like just use action and let the devs spend time on something else?
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I did an off-the-cuff test the other day when this thread started. I made colour noise and fed it into both an action and a comp. I won’t go into detail, but set them up so that a difference matte turned up black almost to 0 softness. I set identical render nodes to 30,000 frames and hit go for each one, one at a time. They both started counting down from 16 minutes render time and I watched each for a moment and they chugged along seemingly the same. Without any bells and whistles turned on, action cranks. Not scientific, but I feel they are about the same.
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That’s a good test results.
As the one who initialize suggested that Action as a 3D compositor would be slower - intuition suggests that doing all the math in a 3D space should exact a toll. However, it’s quite possible that Flame has built in enough optimizations or code paths that avoids those penalties if the schematic mostly contains 2D operations, or that in today’s hardware environment what slows things down takes a lot more than 2D vs. 3D.
Which comes back to - always good to test, instead of just theorizing. I should have done that too before assuming.
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There’s a matchbox node in the Logik collection called Vops (I think). It can act as a multi layered comp node.
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For what it’s worth, the ability to keep the filtering off in action if it is not needed is fairly new in the overall lifetime of flame.
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FWIW … my initial thought was to simply avoid cascading many Comp nodes when pre-comping CG or putting bits & pieces of green screen together (for example).
I prefer having a self-contained premultiplied result with alpha when piecing bunch of different things together and having a simple node to do that would streamline workflow and make for a much cleaner batch set up.
But that’s me … and yes I do use Action for that as well but have experienced issues in the past with front being divided for premult inputs.
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I have a little setup to keep several comp nodes a bit more tidy. It’s certainly not magic but I thought I would share in case it helps anyone who prefers chaining comp nodes over Action. A over B over C, etc.
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That is an amazing use of groups in batch
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