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[uncle808us]

I found an open source video editor that does compositing beautifully (at least for me) and I can adjust the alpha etc. It is called Openshot. http://www.openshot.orgThanks for all the help everyone.

[Greenlaw]

I use After Effects at work, and Fusion and/or AE at home. Occasionally, I use Nuke at work but not so much for 2D stuff. HitFilm is supposed to be a pretty good compositor but I haven't used it myself.

AE is easy to learn and use. It's a layers based compositor, so if you use Photoshop (or Moho for that matter,) you may feel right at home with it. The downside with a layers based compositor is the same as with Moho: it can get messy and difficult to manage once you start nesting complex setups, especially if you're dealing with hundreds of layers and groups. There are a few tools for AE (like the third party Trapcode Particular,) that make it totally worth it though.

AE is part of Adobe's Creative Cloud. IMO, CC is a pretty good deal but only if you use three or more programs in the suite. There are so many tools now, it's easy to get hooked and want to learn them all. I currently use Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Animate (formerly Flash), Audition, Bridge, InDesign, and occasionally Premiere. I used to use DreamWeaver but don't really bother with that anymore, and there's a bunch of stuff I've never even launched. My wife uses the tools during the day when I'm at work, so we really get a lot of mileage out of our subscription.

I believe HitFilm is a layers based compositor like AE. It's a standalone program and doesn't require a subscription. I got a license as part of a Vegas bundle a few years ago but, as mentioned, I haven't used it. I have used some of the HitFilm plugins in AE though and they are top-notch.

Fusion and Nuke are nodal compositors. With nodes, it's easy to see the relationship of all the elements in a scene. Unlike layers, you can hook stuff up in a non-linear manner so it's more efficient when you need to use the same elements over and over again or need to combine elements in different ways for different parts of a composite. If you've never used a nodal compositor, it may seem intimidating at first but it's really easy to follow. The key is to lay out and organize your nodes clearly and logically, then you just follow the path from start (Load nodes) to finish (Output nodes.)

Fusion is currently free for the 'standard' version, and it's really powerful. Recently, they dropped the price of the 'studio' version to about $300, which is fantastic deal. (I paid about $2000 for my original Fusion license years ago, and back then I thought that was a great deal because Fusion cost $5000 at the time.) The Studio version adds 'pro' features like the optical flow tools, 3D camera tracker, unlimited render nodes, plugins and scripting capabilities. But even without these features, you can still do amazing things with the free Fusion.

Nuke is quite similar to Fusion but it's way too expensive, which is funny because Fusion used to cost way more than Nuke does.

To give you an idea of what you can do with these programs, go to my website check out my Rhythm & Hues demo reel and The Asylum demo reels. Most of that stuff was composited in Fusion. For examples of AE, much of what's on my DreamWorks reel is comped in AE. Of my personal Moho projects, Scareplane was comped in Fusion and HLF was comped using AE. All the CGI Brudders stuff (Happy Box, Brudders music video, and Hello Frankenstein,) was comped in Fusion. Sometimes I'll use both Fusion and AE for different parts of a single scene.

Moho works great with any of these compositors, thanks to the Layer Comps panel and Moho Exporter.

As for using Moho to comp pre-rendered layers, yes you can do that. However, I brought up 'breaking out' the elements for compositing because animating effects like transparency is more interactive in a compositing program like Fusion or AE. Many animated effects in Moho are not interactive at all and need to be fully rendered to see the result--this can mean a lot of trial and error renders before getting the effect and timing you want.

In many cases, compositing programs are fully WYSIWYG, which is why I prefer instead to output raw elements for compositing and animating the effects there

Hope this info helps.