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Media (Apple) Businesses Media Software Apple

Apple's Motion Now Shipping 59

Posted by pudge 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!"
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Apple's Motion Now Shipping More

Apple's Motion Now Shipping

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  • Motion is awesome (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nexum ( 516661 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @09:35AM (#9973448)
    We got to get a sneak peek at WWDC this year, Motion is awesome for the price, the effects are just incredible.

    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 :) 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.

    Might be worth the piffling $299 just to play with the thing even if you're not in video PP :)

  • Motion vs. AfterEffects (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spooje ( 582773 ) <spooje@hotma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Sunday August 15, 2004 @09:42AM (#9973474) Homepage
    I've mucked around with Motion a little bit and in general it's a great app, but not yet mature. I still think AfterEffects 6.5 is a better buy with many more features.

    It will be interesting to see what Adobe does with AfterEffects 7.0 and if they include Tiger's upcoming Core image functionality.

    • Featuritis? I want OPTIMIZATION. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by solios ( 53048 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @03:47PM (#9983965) Homepage
      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.

      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. :P
      • 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....

  • successor? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nuggetman ( 242645 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @10:00AM (#9973540) Homepage
    So is this considered a successor to LiveType [apple.com] 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?

    • Re:successor? (Score:5, Informative)

      by pressman ( 182919 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @11:46AM (#9974006) Homepage
      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.
      • 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
  • 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.

  • A Motion owner speaks (Score:5, Informative)

    by daviddennis ( 10926 ) * <david@amazing.com> on Sunday August 15, 2004 @12:53PM (#9974338) Homepage
    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 [creativecow.net], and the Peter Wiggins' Review [creativecow.net] of Motion.

    • Re:A Motion owner speaks (Score:4, Interesting)

      by katanan ( 764663 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @01:20PM (#9974547)
      maybe i'm coming off as a bit of an After Effects fanboy but it has to be said. Adobe addressed the rendering issues in 6.5 with the ability to utilize OpenGL in preview rendering. the behaviours type options you describe in Motion seem nice - but once you get really into the advanced functions of After Effects there are behaviours-like options available except just without the "easy to learn" terminology, part of the charm of using After Effect for an advanced user is that the options for effects and such are dealt with in exact variables so by initially learning the animation and manipulation variables outright you know exactly what to tweak and when. (albeit the learning curve for After Effects is akin to a vertical ascent of a sheer ice wall). much of the effort is just working out how to organize keyframing on the timeline and then everything else (the hundreds of possible operations per keyframe) falls into place.

      although don't get me wrong it's really nice to see an app with less of a learning curve for motion graphics out and i'm really glad it works well for you. Adobe will have a run for it's money versus Motion when Motion can match the functionality and versatility of AE - not just the ease of use - the fuctions between premiere/after effects/illustrator/photoshop in creating elements to manipulate within compositions is still unmatched. Motion will be great for users seeking various basic effects and text manipulation but for commercial applications After Effects and related apps still take the cake in that the expanse of variables is painstakingly detailed at times.

      for teams that tackle things like commercial graphics and film graphic design it is important to tweak everything by hand just to maintain a unique visual style and the more advanced features apply in those uses. I'm not really saying that Motion can't be used in that aspect but to video professionals it may become something akin to seeing an emboss/pixelate photoshop effect on an image for a graphic designer. Point: effects and preset only go so far, for a lot of uses it comes down to detailing (which After Effects still has plenty more of) - well that is just judging from the previews of Motion - inform me if i'm incorrect in this matter.
      • 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,

    • Re:A Motion owner speaks (Score:4, Informative)

      by dFaust ( 546790 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @05:40PM (#9976004)
      '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.

      • Interesting; thanks for the response. It's worth noting that Shake costs $2,995, which is way over my budget, while Motion is $299, which fits very nicely in my budget.

        So it's cool that I can do all those things in Shake, but as long as animation is more a hobby than a business for me, Motion will have to do.

        D

    • It also creates a very odd pheonmenon: A machine where 25% of CPU is being used, but multitasking is sluggish.

      Seems like there's a need for dual processor graphics cards :-)

      • Well, I got an excuse. I've been eyeing that 30" Cinema Display, which requires the fancy graphics card recommended to make Motion sing ($599). So I'll probably get the card, possibly even before I buy the display.

        So we'll see how it does then.

        After Effects actually stops displaying previews when you switch to another application. Motion keeps on running. It will indeed be interesting to see how the higher-end graphics card affects multitasking, but bear in mind that this was just an exercise done out
    • 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
    • I am not a graphics or movie-maker type, but Motion looks like it might be fun to play around with. However, my Mac is a 800MHz G4 iBook with 640MB ram.

      Can Motion be run on this, or are the cpu and graphics too wimpy?

      Thanks

  • BorisFX? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Sunday August 15, 2004 @03:53PM (#9975453)
    Introducing Motion, the only motion graphics package with real-time previews, procedural behavior animation and Final Cut Pro HD integration.

    Seems BorisFX [borisfx.com] 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.

    • The no keyframes thing is pretty big. I can't wait for a copy to see how they are actually working that.

      • No Keyframes (Score:5, Informative)

        by daviddennis ( 10926 ) * <david@amazing.com> on Monday August 16, 2004 @12:38PM (#9981715) Homepage
        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

  • 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.

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