tushantin’s recent post pointed me to the nice (Adobe Effects) tutorials of mtmograph.
I tried to mimic his nice object morphing/motion work, and it turned out pretty easy in Synfig… from the attached samples preview and source.
From the exercice it is my feeling that Synfig is better at
- masking groups of object (via invert + alpha over)
- transform tool (integrating move, size, scale, rotate & shape shifts in one go).
while AEffects is better at
- using color/palette, to eg pick nicely matching color. We need 3-4 clicks to fill an object with a color from an imported palette… in 2 different windows
- aligning objects with each other
- moving group of waypoints (select with mouse box + drag & drop horizontal. we have to ctrl+click on each, one parameter at a time)
- keyboard commands (we lack -at least- shortcuts for “keyframe add”, toggle animate on/off, changing waypoint type -eg via the F2-F8 when a waypoint is active?-)
- moving objects along a path (quite ergonomic path edition actually @16:48, but Synfig does ‘ok’ with right-click > link to spline)
I now have to read more about Synfig’s waypoints advanced parameters to setup a default fast-and-not-automatic-looking transition, pretty sure it’s possible!
Overall the animation (first part) was pretty easy to mimic, so I’d say both softwares are on par for keyframes/transformation recording once you know basics of the tool.
I may do more (or not), and may turn this into a tutorial (or not), if you’d like it let me know… it might help put it higher on my “todo for fun” list 
-edit- tutorial now available at http://youtu.be/sTaSy6Tvaqw.
Berteh.
slick objects transitions.sifz (5.27 KB)