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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!
Anyway - Motion looks cool but it's Mac only so.... ...we'll have to run it using PearPC?
Except then we would have to call it Slow Motion.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
Anyway - Motion looks cool but it's Mac only so....
The correct conclusion to this sentence is... so I'd better go buy a DP 2.5 Ghz G5 as soon as possible.
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.
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
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.
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".
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
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)
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
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.