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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
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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.
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
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
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.