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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
Longer i watch, the more i see the whole movie industry moving away from the use of Macs and Apple altogther.
I did 2years in a Btec where my leacture would go on and on about how great apple were.
Yet he never actually buys the machines, the college buy them for him (including his laptop)... Im going off subject and have forgotton the point of this.
Oh yeh, tbh its doing nothing i haven't seen done before, and it might work great with other Mac software... but how about exporting?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
Wow, you said that so well it didn't sound at ALL like a press release.
Please keep your proprietary non-gpl'd software that doesn't run on Linux to yourself. I'll stick with blender/filmgimp.
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.
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
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.
it's always a big deal to some of my (mac user) friends that macs are reputed to be good for video and print workflow. being someone who has worked at companies which did video editing and one that ran a adobe/mac print publication workflow i've come to the conclusion that macs are okay for the above applications.
as for the video aspect of macs they are well rounded in that you can choose between the final cut line and the adobe/premiere/ae product line but at the end of the day most small budget filmmakers i know have opted for a PC based video editing suite due to the high cost of Apple hardware added to the already high price for the adobe products - which I personally believe to be a more robust suite - whereby the major deciding factor in favour of the adobe line would be photoshop/illustrator integration with the video editing side. Motion can probably hold it's own with design/animation but the abilities offered by a Photoshop/After Effects combo are as of yet unmatched.
for higher budget studios the availability of Shake/Logic is a big plus for the mac side of the argument. but if i were to recommend a direction for small filmmakers it would be a PC with the adobe line. this being that smaller productions don't need apps like Shake and for editing and animation i've found that a well maintained PC is just as fast and nice at editing than a mac.
needless to say that Motion has much growth ahead of it in order to catch up to such apps as After Effects and Combustion. so far it looks to be a nice application with a decent interface and it'll be nice to see some competition for After Effects and Combustion after a little while. Mod me offtopic for my 'mac myth' gripe but I personally don't see any real reason why low budget filmmakers should use an Apple machine over a PC. the common Mac 'party line' is that it's just...better, but it's not until you actually try using both PC and macs for video editing that you realise PC's are just as fast in regards to rendering, workflow and interface - if not even faster - for a lower price.
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.
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.
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....