Compositing Overview

Welcome to the Compositor Workspace, Oraphim's procedural node-based visual effects environment.

While the Edit Workspace is designed for assembling scenes chronologically, the Compositor Workspace is designed for creating complex imagery layer by layer. Whether you are keying a green screen, tracking a 3D object into a shot, removing a wire, or building broadcast motion graphics from scratch, the Compositor provides the tools necessary to execute high-end visual effects.

Why Nodes Instead of Layers?

If you are transitioning from Adobe After Effects, you are accustomed to a "Layer-Based" compositing system. In a layer system, every element is stacked vertically, and effects are hidden inside nested dropdown menus for each layer. While layer-based compositing is intuitive for simple tasks, it quickly becomes unmanageable when dealing with complex visual effects. You end up with hundreds of pre-compositions, making it impossible to see the mathematical flow of your image.

Oraphim utilizes a Node-Based compositing system, similar to Nuke or Fusion.

  • Visual Clarity: Every operation, from importing a piece of footage to blurring it, color correcting it, and merging it with another image, is represented as a "Node" on an infinite 2D canvas.
  • Non-Linear Routing: In a layer-based system, if you want three different text layers to share the exact same blur effect, you must pre-comp them. In Oraphim, you simply draw a connecting pipe from the output of the three text nodes into a single Blur node.
  • Procedural Logic: Node graphs are purely mathematical. The original media is never altered. The graph simply calculates the math from left to right to produce the final output.

Essential Concepts

Before diving into complex VFX, we strongly recommend mastering these core concepts sequentially:

  1. The Node Graph: Learn how to navigate the grid, add nodes, and connect pipes.
  2. The Merge Node: Understand the fundamental concept of combining a Foreground image with a Background image.
  3. Masks and Mattes: Learn how to isolate specific areas of an image using alpha channels.

Let's begin by exploring the anatomy of the Node Graph.