This whole week, I was learning motion graphics, so almost nothing else happened (which is sad because I feel like the whole week just skipped). But here's a quick rant and an amazing discovery of mine:
I hate the fact that there are so few alternatives to After Effects. Don't get me wrong - it's a great program, literally a Swiss knife in this field - but god damn, it's so slow and unoptimized, even for simple stuff. I get that the software is around 30 years old and was definitely written with a lot of restrictions back then, but why can't such a huge corporation do something about it? Maybe it's better to polish the engine and core functions rather than add 1000 more features, idk. And, of course, there's the whole Adobe thing with policies, pricing, and AI. From the start, I've been checking out alternatives, and nothing impressed me, but:
Last week, I accidentally found Cavalry, and this is exactly what I was looking for. It still has a much narrower functionality than AE, but I was never planning to use AE for compositing or anything beyond 2D animation anyway - I prefer DaVinci for that. So, this week, I completed a short introductory course, and it was really fun. It has my favorite software quality: modularity, which makes it capable of so many cool things. I feel like AE has a more utility-driven approach - there are a lot of features to learn, but they're fairly straightforward. Cavalry is kind of the opposite: the toolset is much smaller compared to AE (I basically figured out all its functionality in a week), but the way you can combine everything makes it deep and complex. For now, the plan is to keep learning AE, since it's the most versatile and commonly used tool in motion graphics, but in parallel, I'll try to use Cavalry as much as possible. The team behind it seems amazing - they release updates often and keep adding functionality, so maybe it'll catch up in a few years. Also, the community is insanely talented - just look at these projects. I spent hours going through them.
I forgot to write about my touch typing practice last week: I’ve unlocked all the letters for both Russian and English layouts. My typing is still a bit messy (around 95% accuracy) but overall, I feel much more confident now.
One problem I didn’t expect: it’s really hard to use touch typing in "real life," outside of Keybr. I don’t know why, but my skill drops drastically when I type anything else. Maybe it’s because of punctuation marks and numbers - I still have to look at the keys for those. I’ll try to figure it out next week. Maybe I’ll change my practice format - writing posts and emails instead of using Keybr.
Music picks of the week (all of these are my favorites—you’ll see them often here):
- Sweet Trip – You Will Never Know Why (2009)
- Nick Drake – Pink Moon (1972)
- Talking Heads – Speaking in Tongues (1983)
Anyway, I hope next week will be more chill, because once again, I feel more like a tool than a human. And I still can't figure out how to fix that and actually live my life properly. Maybe I’ll write about it next week.