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Apple's Motion Now Shipping
gz76 writes "Apple's high-performance motion graphic design and production application lets you explore new creative territory using self-propelled behavior animation, character-by-character title animation and a powerful new interface. Motion integrates seamlessly with Final Cut Pro HD and DVD Studio Pro 3, making it quicker and easier than ever to create motion graphics for film, video and DVDs. About time!"
We got to get a sneak peek at WWDC this year, Motion is awesome for the price, the effects are just incredible.
:) but there is room for a Motion 2. Having said that don't let that detract - this is an awesome product, I couldn't believe how easy it was to build simply jaw-dropping effects.
:)
Interestingly Apple are experimenting with the interface, everything can be controlled by gestures, which should please those die-hard fans of this control-method.
There are some things it won't do, I'm not a video-guy so I can't fully remember and I won't attempt to
Might be worth the piffling $299 just to play with the thing even if you're not in video PP
This sig has been deprecated.
It will be interesting to see what Adobe does with AfterEffects 7.0 and if they include Tiger's upcoming Core image functionality.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
So is this considered a successor to LiveType which is bundled with FCP and FCP:HD, or is it a totally separate product. As in, is LT going to stop coming with FCP?
...and that's all there is to it.
In case anyone outside the UK is wondering, 'Btec's are vocational training, for people who reach 16 years old and are still unable to read or write.
sorry about the ad copy there guys, we were going to add something like "Has anyone used this?" or "I work with XYZ, and can't work without it" but we're tired, and we know you don't really read this shit.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
The NAB Demo Video available on Motion's website is a bit odd. The content is fine, but the postproduction is strange.
The first thing I noticed was the stereo crowd hubbub - surely the demonstrator's headset mike didn't pick up the crowd in stereo? Was it added in post? Then I noticed that the two audience applause moments during the demo were clearly added in post as a sound effect. Why?
Anyway - Motion looks cool but it's Mac only so....
Skevos Mavros
http://www.mavart.com
Yeah, it's SOOOOO inappropriate to write something positive about Apple software in the APPLE section of /.
Pooty tweet
Yeah, the motion picture industry is definitely moving away from Mac's. Sure. There are absolutely no post houses using FCP or Shake. Not one person is purchasing or using Logic. The Lord of the Rings didn't actually use Shake at all either.
Look, Apple is doing quite well in the motion picture and video fields. I don't know where you're looking, but Apple is actually starting to give Avid a run for their money. They definitely haven't overtaken Avid, but trailer houses are ditching their Avid rigs in favor of far cheaper FCP rigs like crazy. Motion will help with this adoption, but it won't be a replacement for AfterEffects by a long shot.
Keep the "People are moving away from Apple" rhetoric to yourself or move to another section of this site where such blather is more welcomed.
Pooty tweet
I'm a budding motion graphics artist who's used After Effects for about a year, without a lot of success. After Effects is very powerful, but it's also extremely slow, even on my dual 2ghz G5. The immediate feedback you really need when doing motion graphics design just isn't there, unless you shrink your image to near the point of invisibility.
Motion is an amazing program. To start with, the user interface is almsot entirely intuitive. Whenever I had a question, nine times out of ten I could just look around the screen and find the answer. The overall feel of everything is very smooth and fluid.
Motion creates superior performance by using the computing power of your graphics card. For the first time in my life, the power of my graphics card is actually important. (I don't care for games, so that's never been an issue). It also creates a very odd pheonmenon: A machine where 25% of CPU is being used, but multitasking is sluggish. This, of course, is because the graphics processor is being used at full speed!
With my graphics card, the standard one on the G5, Motion can do simple animations at full speed, and more complex ones half-speed. (After Effects, even with a fairly small image, would do its preview at about quarter speed). I found I could figure out a lot of things successfully at half speed and only occasionally had to render the RAM preview to view them at full speed.
You can build an animation in pieces. Comps in After Effects are like layers in Motion. You can save a layer in motion (which can have nested layers forever) as a Favorite. Then you can pull it out of Favorites to another project. This is one of the few things in Motion that's not fairly obvious, so it's good to note it here. For example, I was able to make my crab's legs move in a short animation. Then I saved that as a layer called "Crab Walk". When I want my crab to walk, I just drag that animation from favorites into the canvas, and start moving the crab around; the legs will keep moving automatically.
Motion has several innovative features, which as far as I know exist in no other program today. For example, instead of keyframing a motion path (which you can also do, if you want), you can use behaviours. For instance, the Throw behaviour simulates pushing something until another force stops it. The gravity behaviour creates simulated gravity, and so the item that you Throw will drift down towards the bottom of the screen. You can adjust the speed of the throw and the amount of gravity you want. You can then use the Edge simulation to cause the object to bounce when it hits the bottom, top or sides of the screen. This is amazingly fun to work with and makes it very easy to do realistic animations which would take hours of tedium in After Effects.
I've only had the program for a few days, so obviously I've only scratched the surface. But this program is one of the few I've seen that's truly worth the hype. After Effects is in grave danger of becoming a deposed king; this program is easier to learn and use, faster and saves hours of effort. For everything it can do, it blows away AE.
Hope that helps.
D
(For a more detailed discussion of Motion, see Creative Cow's Motion Forum, and the Peter Wiggins' Review of Motion.
This post is complete bs.
LotR didn't use shake?
Maybe not on a mac, but most definetly on linux.
FCP is like the standard for on the dailies, and quick edits.
I agree motion won't over take AE, but as soon as 3d compositing is added it will give some competition.
Especially with the behaviors/better particles/and way way way better color tools.
Default color tools on AE suck, who wants to spend a few grand on 3rd party plugs?
it's simple really. if you do these sorts of things for a living, the chances are you make enough money from one-two jobs to easily afford a powerful mac. a lot of people in the video, content creation, graphcis, and printing industry swear by the macs for increased productivity.
if a mac lets you finish 10 jobs instead of 7 jobs in the same amount of time, that's a large some of money you otherwise wouldn't make. a tool to professionals is a rather cheap one time cost to production, so to foregoe the correct tool for a "$500" savings, is a bit rediculous.
- tristan
see that is the myth that i tend to see does not exist, i have worked frequently with both mac and PC workflow for both video and print and that conclusion is that if you are good with a PC and can properly build your own to your custom specs and properly maintain it there is no real performance or productivity gain offered by a mac. a mac workflow has never proven to me effectively that it is better and more 'productive' than a PC.
the mac party-line or "increased productivity" has been lost no many of my co-workers and it's interesting to see that some professors i know are pushing for PC labs in classrooms because of easy upgrade, cheap price (therefore more machines can be bought) and the relatively same degree of productivity. many of the workplaces that my freinds have functions in use a mac workflow for print/video but it's interesting to note that at home most of them swear by the versatility of their PC versus owning a mac at home. granted that macs are easier for graphic designers and video editors that don't take an interest in customizing their hardware options and variables for better performance and customization. my point being that as long as you're good enough with computer to keep your PC performing well (and workflow organized) there is no real backbone to the mac 'productivity' claim.
whereby "productivity" just becomes buzzword.
"if you are good with a PC and can properly build your own to your custom specs and properly maintain it there is no real performance or productivity gain offered by a mac"
People who can do that are not video professionals.
Seems BorisFX has had all this nailed for quite some time, and at a variety of price points- ranging from the OEM bundles all the way up to stuff like Boris Red. A lot of their stuff is OpenGL accelerated, so it should be just as fast, and it works on both Mac and PC NLE platforms...almost two dozen of them? Nevermind that BorisFX gives away the Keyframer authoring program so you can diddle and learn the interface or even work on projects on laptops, home systems, workstations other than your production rig, etc.
So I have to ask- what's the big deal here? It's been a couple of years since I looked at any of this, so someone please lay it out for me.
Please help metamoderate.
People who can do that are not video professionals.
any specific reason as to why you believe that statement to be true? people that do video for a living should know their hardware inside and out. for example i need to know details on everything from the cameras available on a project to the type of audio capture device (be it reel or MD or other) and I have to know the specific workflow that the project needs for completion and therefore customize hardware for the task. for example if a client has an old reel to reel filmstrip he needs to capture the normal mac setup won't cut it you'll need a film scanner and such. or else someone has a multiple source project you need a system capable of handling the multiple capture options (above the average 1394 devices).
i have never met a good video 'pro' who does not know his stuff concerning his workstation and the type of equipment he needs down to the last detail. if you can memorize the operation on maintenance of video cameras, audio capture and lighting fixtures a computer really isn't that far beyond that. many of my friends have realized that the mac line of "easy to use" and "productive" sometimes just doesn't cut it. so the argument that video professionals should just sit there and use a mac without question just because Apple says it is a more productive platform really falls flat - because those that have the motivation to try out different configurations of machines win out by getting the project done perhaps faster and cheaper.
Maybe I should have put tags in my last post. My intent was to use sarcasm to underscore the idiocy of the parent post that said Apple was being used less and less in the motion picture field. The truth is that Apple is actually making headway in the film and video fields and actually starting to take Avid on head to head.
Pooty tweet
Sadly,
Video editors on the PC side *DO* need to know both ends.
If you want to spend time tweaking your hardware when you could simply use the hardware that came to you, go ahead. Some of us would rather not ever have to tweak our machines. PCs, I'll tweak the hell out of, Macs -- I don't even bother with upgrade cards because its lost productivity to deal with it when if I need a new machine I just buy it.
My day job I program PCs for a living and managing a department that does the same. We have to work with the hardware at times to see why things aren't working correctly.
My side job as a music tech / audio editor -- I end up making enough that its easy to get new machines. I've never understood the guys that do it professionally that can't get these gigs -- especially since I don't hold any punches just because this isn't a full time job...if I want to call myself a professional, I charge as much as a professional (and sometimes more because I have enough other things going on that I try to bill out at a rate that weeds out the idiots -- I'm always being told someone is charging less than I do and I simply tell them if they think the other guys work is as good as mine and he's charging less, they should go with them and not bother me).
But again, a part time job that does add income to my life still affords buying a machine every year or two and I can get my work done just as well as anyone else -- even on these 'older' machines. Hell, I had an 8600 AV that I used until recently for certain tasks. It wasn't the most powerful, but it served its need and did so without needing tweaks.
Ease of use isn't just the OS, but the fact you don't need to fuck with the hardware. Certain geeks don't get this because they like working with the hardware and don't think that taking a work machine down for a few hours just to throw something new into it isn't a bad thing. I have friends that do the same thing to their cars...I helped a guy change out a perfectly good carb the other day for one that worked slightly better (he wanted one that didn't deal with having to calibrate dual webers ever few weeks -- even though I had the same ones in my vintage car and *NEVER* fucked with the carbs).
So, if you don't mind dealing with it, cool. you *STILL* need to calculate the time you work on this stuff when you charge your clients...if not for billing them, but so that you actually understand how much time you are dealing with this.
Then again, what do I know...I only work with this stuff part time. Maybe because I use Macs, I can get away with it and don't have to spend 20 hours a week to "try out different configurations of machines".
despite all that, macs are considered more usable by the experts. many studies have been done on the subject, and most of them lean towards macs being the easier to use machines. i'm not going out of my way to say why, but i'll leave this up to the reader.
many can argue things like price, or performance for macs. however a dual 2.0 or soon a dual 2.5 performs well enough for these people. a 30" LCD is going to be a godsend to those doing HD work. combine this with FCP-HD, DVD studio pro 3.0, motion, photoshop CS, and many many more professional apps, and the mac is easily better than a pc at such work.
- tristan
Sorry, but saying Premiere beats FCP out on performance is sheer lunacy. I make my living off of Adobe products (PS, ILL, ID, Acrobat, AE, but Premiere is a bad NLE and it's "real time" performance is laughable.
If you're going to tout the Wintel party line in terms of video post-production, please at least mention the Avid options. Avid is both Win & Mac and they offer a range of products that far surpass Premiere in terms of quality and power.
Pooty tweet
i see what you mean and i really agree with you on many points.
nobody inferred that to "try out different configurations of machines" takes 20 hours a week, nor is it as big of a deal as many mac users make it. but the fact is that the PC as a platform for video/audio and print is endlessly customizable, in an era where machines can be upped in performance and capability easily why stick with the standard hardware offered by Apple? in my opinion it's not a productivity loss to upgrade your machine because it only comes around once or so a year and by upgrading you get more of a continual use out of your investment.
many mac users hold the idea that when Apple says "productivity!" "doesn't crash!" "it works!" "it's beautiful!" it is the paradigm of computing. but that is just a weird way of thinking to me. listen, i've used macs countless times before and i genuinely like them but what i try to get across is even though they are good machines they are essentially no better than a PC - or even slightly worse because a PC is more open.
what i am argueing is that it's not that great to get stuck in a rut about something. for example i am argueing something akin to this in relation to professional video editing: many people use Windows - some people use an alternative OS. Windows allows surface customization, with alternative OSs you can cuztomize anything you want and this subsequently could prove more versatile.
once again, I am not a mac hater, i use them at work but that doesn't mean you can't question the idea of a mac - i don't like how you can't mess around, i don't enjoy the fact that Apple just pretty much skips performance issues and hides behind advertising buzzwords. but i do respect the fact that it gets the job done for some people. since i can screw around with my on PCs all i want and increase their performance beyond that of a mac for video editing and print then i subsequently will like my PC more. but many mac users can't seem to get this point that there are alternatives to the 'industry standards' presented and that sometimes these alternatives may prove to be better than what is 'standard'
ie. it was brought up in this thread that WETA chose to use Shake on Linux rather than on the mac platform. why? because they could customize machines to do the job better.
I agree on the avid systems, but the thread here is about Motion vs. other motion graphics animation apps. so therefore because of the Premiere/Photoshop/Illustrator connection to After Effects i included Premiere, not because i think premiere is better i just believe the combo of the four pieces proves better for advanced users. I use FCP a lot actually, many of my friends who do skate/snowboard vids prefer FCP so subsequently I had to learn to use them.
The 20 hours was a troll. Sorry about that. But even 2 hours a week, means I could have earned another $200 towards a better machine.
/.'rs but it is still noticeable to the point that I get annoyed by it. I use my Powerbook MUCH more than my PCs because its always with me, even when I'm doing my day job and its getting a lot of use.
I say productivity -- I don't say doesn't crash. Crashes a lot less than a Windows Machine. Crashes more than my Linux Boxes (then again, I don't install new software weekly on my Linux boxes...I just upgraded MySQL a few weeks ago, and it downed the box somehow...so the idea that installing new packages and crashing a machine is probably somewhat similar).
I have pretty crash proof PCs compared to most
As for customizing the OS??? I can't cease to be amazed by folks that talk about things like surface customizations -- oh I can have a different windows manager. Did ya know you can run Gnome or KDE on OS X? Sounds pretty customizable to me. Hardware? What? Are you building your own devices? So you have some lock in. Big deal. Only those that can't afford the hardware will find this a problem. I find it a problem when a professional tells me he can't afford the tools of his trade.
Performance? The performance of my machines is good enough for me. Compared with what I was doing 5 years ago, I can get MUCH more done -- on either platform. its just not an issue.
As for WETA -- why did they go with Linux? Because when they bought Shake it was on 3 platforms -- Windows, Iris and Linux. They built around the Windows platform because it was the cheapest at the time compared to the talent they had. They had a render farm that was big enough at the time to be in the Top 500 Supercomputer, if I remember the interview correctly. Why did they choose to move to Linux? They had the hardware and Windows wasn't an upgradable option once Apple bought the package.
Had nothing to do with being more customizable. had everything to do with having the hardware. Did ya expect them to throw out a few thousand machines? From what I've heard, their next production is using Xserves as well...nothing to do with customizability...
On another subject, how many video editors do you know that are willing to hack software and hardware. The most efficient ones I've ever met always bought package deals no matter what OS / Hardware manufacturer they went with and used them as is. Same with audio editors...I've known a few geeks that were dissatisfied that they wrote their own software -- but these were OS geeks that weren't after better software, but free software (as in liberte as opposed to beer). I've never been happy with their software, but I support them because they are friends and because they are trying to change the world.
The noncustomizable stuff has ALWAYS been better...at least so far.
1. professionals that use PCs know well enough how to avoid viruses, spyware, crashes etc. if they don't then i guess it's better they stick to the mac platform
2. it's not about the environment in which the tools exist, the tools rely on perfomance yes but artists/editors who function first outside of the operating environment (such as sketchbooking, storyboarding and timeline structuring) are those that become truly innovative and 'creative', if you're relying on creativity from the environment in which your tools exist you're looking in the wrong place.
3. good point though.
4. final cut is a very robust app I use it all the time for editing when i do use a mac environment, my point is that even if i did use final cut for basic editing on the mac i would still choose the export the resulting files to after effects for further production work - Motion as a lot of catching up to do.
sorry for my knee-jerk reactions too dude.
and i see what you mean
the "surface customizable" line was a metaphor not an actual gripe. sorry if you took that that way
again, sorry about the WETA reference, it was mentioned earlier in this thread and I should have RTFA'ed again to refresh my memory on the subject instead of just using it.
funny that you say that though many of my friends LOVE to hack hardware and software to do things..for example one of my friends took courses and such so that he could mod audio tools and electronic instruments to better work in conjunction with his computer equipment - which meant actively taking apart audio capture devices and modifying them. standards are there to be broken for individual purpose, so whether you choose to or not is really...your choice.
i always am amazed by the perpetuation that "professionals" HAVE to be efficient or buy the standards.. but part of the fields are always experimentation for innovation - for example in the arena graphic design you ALWAYS try to muck around and come out with something that's great and sometimes that involves doing wierd things with equipment (like screwing with WACOM tablets and going back to traditional media to augment digital techniques)
As for hacking hardware / software --
/. was started (wasn't even called /. back then) -- so yeah, its afforded me the opportunity to meet a lot more folks than when I was a recording artist (hell, it was supposed to be a hobby to keep in touch with the industry after I gave it up in disgust, and now I've been sucked back in the industry as much as I ever was).
I run one of the largest users groups for Emagic's Logic audio as well as running the largest users group for a piece of hardware that use to be the first choice for sound design. There are geeks in both areas -- as well as professionals that experiments / build / design for both the mass market as well as the hobbiest market (err...or for their own pleasure)...I started that back at the same time
But there is a lot of reasons to do this stuff...for fun or for profit. Few actually use nonstandard means for anything but fun...
As for being efficient or buying the standards. Whats you job? To be artistic or to get the job done? It depends. If its to add an artistic touch, efficiency is not an issue as much as a standard tech that is hired to do a specific job and to fulfill their clients requests.
Standards? Its only needed if you want to have a community built around supporting you. if you want to go off on your own, feel free to gain all the knowledge needed to get the job done. I'm always amazed at folks in the industry that consider me an expert in some areas (and pay me accordingly) -- I constantly tell them almost to the point of professional suicide that its not that I know about this stuff, its that I have a few thousand common folks that might know a specific piece of knowledge and I have made my communities easy enough to search both on and offline (something I've been meaning to put on CD for my people one of these days -- I got it, but that only helps me) -- without standard -- it would be a lot harder to deal with.
For instance, Apple bought up Emagic a few years back...we were already an Emagic site and I ran the software on PC and Mac (mostly PC at the time). The Windows Hardware support forums were 10x as busy as the Mac hardware support forums -- and with a lot more unanswered questions (we actually kept hardware around in a communal library donated by companies to see if we could emulate problems). The lack of standards on the Windows side made it a LOT harder to come up with solutions. As for the 10x Windows hardware -- a poll at the time showed Mac users were slightly more into the platform than the PC users -- at least on my site. I think it was like 56% Mac / 44% PC. Big disparity in problems between platforms considering the userbases.
Again, standards are only needed if you want to build on what others have around you.
Personally, I deal with the more creative end of things when I'm not in professional mode -- that allows me to be nonefficient and fuck around all I want. I have a few of those WACOM tablets -- good for drawing waveforms as much as it in Painter or Photoshop. Its all dependent on what folks are asking you to do.
well it seems we agree - i have nothing against anything you just posted.
actually just so you know - most of the stuff i do 'professionally' (in the sense which is generally accepted) has been bland jobs that i just get done. the reason i myself screw around is to further what i'm doing myself, for me commercial purposes take a passenger seat to just having fun with it. it's a skewed perspective i know but what's the fun in sticking to what everyone else is doing?
even if it's more efficient or has a support community some of the best and greatest things i've ever learnt were in the process of resolving issues around hardware and software in the mid to late 90's. when it was not too common to do digital video and a lot of print media it made me better at what i do by being able to work around the problems presented to me.
i don't believe in the concept of a 'creative' really and i don't see any boundary between a 'professional' and an 'artist', in fact i don't see many boundaries at all.
If you want to say that four products makes a company better than one... I can reply to that with, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Logic, Shake, and Motion. Add to that the fact that Photoshop works pretty well with just about anything that could work with it because everyone makes an effort to make sure PS users don't have any problems with their stuff, I don't see how PS could make Premier better than it makes FCP better.
you are not taking my words in the right terms, i'm not saying that After Effects/Illustrator/Photoshop make Premiere better but rather the corelation and integration to After Effects of Premiere/Illustrator/Photoshop enchances After Effects
i'm not saying that Final Cut Pro/Motion are bad, hell i've used them countless times it's just that that suite has some catching up to do to equal the functions provided by the (now) more advanced adobe suite (for motion graphics!)
and yes i've used FCP and i know it is a very nice program.
How do you mean? I do most of my work in Illustrator/After Effects/Photoshop/Final Cut. What integration in Premier works more natively than with Final Cut?
Not being sarcastic, I'm honestly curious.
Mod point free since 2001
Instead of having keyframes, you take an object (say a crab), and tell the program to throw the crab across the screen at a velocity and angle you specify. Then you go to the time you want it to stop and you add a "stop" behaviour to the timeline at that point and it will stop.
That doesn't sound too different from keyframes. But take the "throw" behaviour and add a "drag" and it will slowly glide to a stop, the speed depending on how much drag you add. Then add "gravity" of a certain amount and the crab will drift down to the bottom of the screen. Add the Edge and it will bounce off the edges, repeatedly, with the parameters you select.
This makes it really simple to do a lot of things that would take massive time and effort with keyframes.
Of course Motion still has keyframes for when you need them, and many of Motion's behaviours can be keyframed, too.
Hope that piqued your interest. It really is one amazing application.
D
I use After Effects for a lot of the work I do for my day job, and to put it bluntly, AE6 SUCKS. It's incredibly slow, most of which is due to generous memory defaults that tell the app to use a hell of a lot of swap (living in swap slows ANYTHING in OS X down to a crawl- it's orders of magnitude more sluggish than VM in OS 9), and there's a ton of issues with the rendering engine- namely the fact that it doesn't apply blending modes during a scrub, which hoses any benefit OF scrubbing when you have a ton of elements that suddenly turn into flat-colored, zero detailed blocks. Scrub and one of my projects suddenly looks like it's being produced for an Atari 2600. :P
:P
That and navigating by timecode is an incredible pain in the ass in AE- you have to either manually input the time you want, or use the interface panel buttons for next/previous frames.
AE has a lot of good points, but it's sluggish and the interface is seriously lacking. Like most Adobe apps, it hasn't transitioned to OS X very well at all. It's still faster to use/render in 4 in Classic (which does 90% of what 5-6 do, if you're only concerned with the basics) than it is to use/render in 5.5 or 6.
Even though AE gets more expensive with every version, its still a hell of a lot cheaper than Combustion, Commotion, and other Professional Compositing Apps.
AE is a lot like Final Cut Pro. People use it because it's powerful enough for the price. They'll drop it the second something better comes along.
I can't wait to get Motion at work. If it proves out, then the only Adobe app I'll need on my system is Photoshop, which I run in Classic anyway (since type handling in PS6 and higher makes said versions useless for the sort of work I do anyway).
The odds of Adobe doing anything with Core Image anytime soon are really slim- AE is also a PC app, much like photoshop, which means that Adobe has to balance API-hooking against a portable codebase.
:P
That said, I use AE 6 and it's solid for a lot of things, but it's FREAKING SLOW on a 2x2ghz g5 with 2g ram. And it's time control / scrubbing functionality sucks ass. A BIG, SWEATY ass.
I don't want more features, I want a more tightly optimized app that handles as fluidly as Final Cut Pro.
And it doesn't look like I'll be getting that from Adobe.
Likewise, I pay the bills using Adobe and Apple software. I've had the misfortune of suffering Adobe's piss-poor, somebody-kick-their-engineers-in-the-balls-plz OS X software. It's balls. I remember when Photoshop 5 running on a 9600 spanked the crap out of a p450 (which was more than twice as fast!). PS CS on the AMD box in the office absolutely annihilates PS on our G5s.
Consequently, we've been looking to drop Adobe software where feasable, and Premiere was the first thing to go. Why we even had it, I'm not sure- it was a legacy purchasing decision made by someone who doesn't work here anymore. Premiere is decent for quick and dirty audio editing of existing video, but using it as an editor is a joke. Capturing with it a scream to watch. Final Cut Pro absolutely creams Premiere in every category- particularly interface (intuitive! FANCY THAT.), manual (documentation! FANCY THAT.), memory utilization (FCP4 loads in 1/4 the time the last version of Premiere for OS X took to load on the same hardware), multiple audio and video tracks....
Really, Premiere fit somewhere between iMovie and FCP. Much closer to iMovie. Adobe pulling the software for the Mac is as much an admission of their inability to produce something useable as it is Apple's ability to do the reverse.
What's the thought process that AVID can even compete with Shake or Combustion or Digital Fusion, et al?
These are totally different products with a different end result.
Macs have their place in compositing and effects, but I'd wager a good deal more people are using discreet Infernos, Flames, and Smoke machines to do these "movie effects" than you'd see a Shake.
I can't tell you how many features and commercials I see that have been made on a discreet machine over an Apple. Apple's tend to get more press for it, because they've got the ad budgets for it, and Apple tends to think they need more press for stuff like this to further their user base.
hit up discreet's website and check out their client demo reels. You'll see more than just LOTR's as a demoreel. http://www.discreet.com
Just cause New Line and Apple pimp out their system rigs to a end user on the DVD's doesn't mean that everyone uses it, or that this or another configuration is the only solution that they use.
Graphics houses usually have several solutions to their work. Shake is usually the option of choice if they're doing simple compositing with TONS of placements of things in the shot (like the battle of pelinnor field in ROTK)
It's not a titler (like motion seems to be) with particle animations. It's not a bunch of presets. It's laborious work to make a composite work properly.
If not for the fact that Apple's got so few choices for uncompressed video capture, I'd consider getting one.
But motion's not for me. If it had some actual controls and not a preset list, and had 3D integrated into it, it'd be a runner for AE and combustion, but it holds no candle (nor will it ever) to Digital Fusion or an Inferno.
Ease of use isn't just the OS, but the fact you don't need to fuck with the hardware. Certain geeks don't get this because they like working with the hardware and don't think that taking a work machine down for a few hours just to throw something new into it isn't a bad thing. I have friends that do the same thing to their cars...I helped a guy change out a perfectly good carb the other day for one that worked slightly better (he wanted one that didn't deal with having to calibrate dual webers ever few weeks -- even though I had the same ones in my vintage car and *NEVER* fucked with the carbs).
The parent is also assuming you'll always be using your home machine, which just isn't the case for many editors, animators, audio pros and graphic designers. I'll typically work both at home and out of two or three production houses a year. I can sit down at any Mac system and pretty much be ready to go that day-- I couldn't imagine the PITA it would be if I had to figure out what all the mods, hacks and tweaks were in a customized and "optimized" PC.
Requires Panther. What do you want to bet that the next version will require Tiger?
I'd like to see what this program requires in Panther that isn't available in Jaguar.
try loading a targa stream into AE and FCP, then tell me which one is a hog. AE certainly has many places where there is room to improve, but at least it handles filetypes properly. I have lots of experience with FCP chewing up files, whereas AE and Premiere both handle the files fine. Targa streams are one; it has been broken since version 1 of FCP, animation codec on long clips is another....