Duh. A bad case of delayed intelligence here.

FinalCut can composite images too, and has almost all of UltraFractal’s merge modes with a 1:1 correspondence. It was a simple matter to bring in the three Tendrillon layers and merge them with “Multiply” and “Difference” to get the exact look of the original UF image.

FinalCut can do a fair number of compositing tricks, including blurs and whatnot, so I think I can simply do the bulk of the compositing work in it, saving Shake for special stuff like warping a layer, faking camera shake, or complex animations. That said, I’ve also found that the “MultiLayer” node in Shake has all the right merge modes and generally gives identical results too… although there are a few head-scratchers sometimes.

Now I have to figure out how to do more complex timeline stuff in FinalCut… sigh, yet another tool to learn. I’m really interested in what the next version of FinalCut (likely announced in just a few weeks at the NAB conference) will have. More books to order, too!

One thing I haven’t even looked at yet is Motion, which looks pretty cool. It also has direct MIDI input for controlling its animation parameters. Hmm, that sounds up my alley!