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Apple's Motion Now Shipping

Posted by pudge on from the kickin dept.

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!"

5 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re:successor? by pressman · · Score: 4, Informative

    Live Type will continue to ship with FCP. Not everyone is going to buy Motion or the Production Suite, but will still want to make fancy titles. Live Type is here to stay mostly because it's a dedicated one trick pony that's ridiculously simple to use and generates pretty impressive effects.

    All that said, Apple's going to have a hard time with Motion because AfterEffects has such a strong hold in the pro motion graphics market. Motion looks like a good app, but it's going to take a while for it to catch up with AfterEffects in terms of power and and robustness. I think it will catch on with mid level DVD authors before it really catches on with hard core, professional motion graphics artists. Apple won't push AfterEffect sout of the Mac market like they did with Premiere.... which is a horrible, stinky piece of non-linear crap.

    Despite Motion's shortcoming in comparison to AfterEffects, Combusitons and Commotion, I'll still buy a copy using my Apple educational discount.

    --
    Pooty tweet
  2. A Motion owner speaks by daviddennis · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:A Motion owner speaks by dFaust · · Score: 3, Informative
      'Behaviors' are actually nothing new, Shake has been completely scriptable since at least v2 (v2 has been around since '99 or 2000, I believe) and discreet's Combustion 3 introduced scripting capabilities, as well (opting for Javascript for it's language). Not sure about After Effects or other packages.

      I think the key difference here is the focus Apple is putting on Motion's behaviors for beginners, the easy access to the functions, and the amount of included behaviors. While it would certainly be easy for someone like myself to create a 'Throw' function in Shake, the same can't necessarily be said for a novice... and a 'Throw' function isn't already included in Shake. Though, in fact, some of Shake's nodes are essentially 'Behaviors'... such as the Shake node. It shakes your image and doesn't need to be keyframed.

      Given the amount of freely downloadable macros for Shake, it wouldn't surprise me if someone duplicated all of Motion's behaviors for Shake. None the less, it's nice to see Apple including such a large library of behaviors for people to utilize in Motion.

      As far as speed is concerned, a dual 2.5ghz with a faster video card can do RIDICULOUS things at full speed. Apple is actually utilizing their Core Image and Core Video APIs for Motion, which will be available for anyone to use come 10.4.

    2. Re:A Motion owner speaks by daviddennis · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've used 5.5 and 6.0, and each time I remember reading that rendering speed was up, and each time I remember not thinking there was much change. So I guess I'm a bit jaded about promised AE speed improvements.

      There are features that I have not explored that look suspiciously like the velocity graphs of After Effects, which I assume is what you're referring to. It certainly looks like there is a lot of scope for precise teaking, and some of the behaviours can be keyframed for greater precision.

      However, if you love displaying all your AE timeline graphs on one screen, as I do, Motion might not make you that happy because you can only see the timeline for one object at a time. I can already tell that's going to be a major problem when I go to manual tweaking.

      But you can also tweak in ways that are somehow more natural to me. Instead of manually affecting motion paths, you can throw an object, and use an invisible object to attract and/or repel the object and thus change its motion path. I've been playing around with this and it creates some very nice looking motion with minimal effort. Needless to say if I can concentrate on what I want to animate instead of concentrating on how to do it, that's going to create a much better show in the end.

      The canned effects seem to have a pretty good range of parameters. My way of thinking of it is that you have the same power, it's just more accessible. I recommend that if you have a spare G5 handy, you give Motion a chance. I think that if nothing else, you'll appreciate the effort that went into building it. I like it because I'm a single person, not a team, and I just don't have time to deal with a program requiring one. Motion's great for someone who wants to produce professional-looking results as an amateur - and for a kids' cartoon (which is my project), I suspect I don't need the power and total originality you do.

      D

  3. No Keyframes by daviddennis · · Score: 4, Informative

    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