After Effects vs. Motion

[Steve Roberts]

You can make changes to your animation as it loops. It will update automatically. Nifty.
However, depending on your animation and hardware, it might not happen at full frame rate.
It has fun particles.
It has no 3D capabilities yet.
It allows you to apply motions, such as “throw” if you’re in a hurry and don’t feel like keyframing.
It’s similar to AE, but different.
I expect to use it on simpler projects, but right now, I’m faster with AE because I’m more familiar with it.

Try searching the COW archives for “apple” and “motion”. There were a few posts when it came out. Also, try Motion forums.

[Tony Kloiber]

I’ve use AE for years (maybe too many) and have just now started to use Motion. For 90% of your standard Mograph stuff Motion is great. Lots of things that help you fiddle around and come up with something or quickly get down to something strait forward. The connection to FCP is nice as well. You might find that you’ll be using both. There are a number of things AE can do “better” then Motion (at least right out of the box). Keying, Tracking, 2.5D all the VFX and Compositing kind of things are (to me) easier in AE.

Keep this in mind. Mac Pro > Intel Chips > Universal Binary. Adobe nada. You will be running Adobe apps in an emulation layer (Rosetta) so, if your use to a fast computer (windows or Mac), this will be frustrating.

Also get the video card upgrade (radon X19 T something) this is what will make Motion really run well.

TonyTony

[Pierre Jasmin]

Slightly tangential but here you go:

If you have a large arsenal of AE plugins note that Motion Intel Mac does not yet support AE plugins on MacTel side (only FCP, support meaning here not turned off). I think the latest PPC dot release of Motion finally does fix some long standing AE support issues on the PPC side. It’s fine that Apple promotes it’s own FXPlug API but isn’t a great value that some application like Fusion have their own native API and support as well AE plugins? The majority of our clients on the Mac for AE plugins use AE and FCP (sure there all kinds of variations on that theme) so they would not be well served if Apple persists on wanting to NOT continue supporting AE compatible plugins, by then having to buy 2 times the same thing just because a company thinks marketing wise it’s not comfortable to say we support an Adobe owned specification.

I heard (not tried) as well the capacity to load a Motion project embedded in a Quicktime movie in AE is back working as well, as such you can use as a sort of import plugin in AE instead of Particle Playground and things like that, so the fact that it comes “free” with FCP means you will find applications for it even if you still use AE.

Pierre
RE:Vision Effects

[Tim Wilson]

The native integration between Motion and After Effects is limited. Yes, you can send your Motion project to AE, but without editbable elements. It shows up as a QuickTime movie. Nice, but that’s about the end of it.

If you want to really tie them together, you need to be using software from Automatic Duck. That will allow you to send the Motion project to After Effects where it opens as a comp with the layers rebuilt for you. There are some obvious limitations to this — AE can’t reproduce features that Motion has and AE doesn’t (eg, particles). But if you want to create roughs in Motion and finish them in AE with its more robust toolset (that you also happen to know much better), this is the way to go.

tw

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

“There are some obvious limitations to this — AE can’t reproduce features that Motion has and AE doesn’t (eg, particles).”

Apple marketing is second to none, isn’t it?
Of all cool things in Motion, that’s not a feature AE doesn’t have (in fact, there are a couple of tricks in Particle Playground that are not available in Motion at all, like having an arbitrary wall for particles to rebound, or using the luminance/color of a layer as a map to affect particle behavior: it’s even possible to apply time remapping to particles based on that information). It’s just something that is very different between the two programs, and that’s why it’s impossible to convert from one to the other. In the same way text animation is impossible to convert. Motion’s Parameter behaviors (wriggle, oscilate, negate, etc), on the other hand, would be really easy to translate to simple, one command AE expressions, if anybody wanted to.

Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com

[Alexander Gao]

Another point: Motion is more for motion graphics, so it would probably be inferior to AE in terms of compositing related things. For that, Apple has Shake which is an incredibly robust application.

Alexander Gao

“When the revolution happens, I’ll be leading it.”