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Apple gives up another network client
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[Chris Harlan] “I’ve done quite well with Motion. So I get peeved, a bit, when people speak ill of her, even when she probably deserves it.”
But she really doesn’t. Motion is perfectly capable.
It is not better than Ae. Ae has a lot more going for it.
Somehow, I think Apple knows this and knows where FCP fits in to this. My guess is that we will see more development in FCPX.
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[Chris Harlan] “I’ve done quite well with Motion. So I get peeved, a bit, when people speak ill of her, even when she probably deserves it.”
Completely understandable, lest anyone forget… AE was in the same position for years before anyone took it seriously as a tool for VFX artists. It wasn’t until post houses like The Orphanage started admitting to using it in their pipelines, that AE got ANY (grudging) respect or acknowledgement from high-end professionals. Honestly, you can still get poked at by Nuke, Fusion, Flame, Inferno and Shake (yes, Shake) artists for admitting to using AE for compositing. So you’re in good company, I think. 🙂
Shawn
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Wow, even the VP of Applications Marketing ‘sort of’ believed in Motion.
it MAY do for motion graphics what FCP did for editing. MAY being the operative word.
At least they were realistic about it then. I don’t see anything in that release about taking down After Effects?
“I think the reason that this whole conversation seems odd to me is that I perceive Motion as being part of FCP and one of the reasons I like FCP so much. I think of Soundtrack Pro as belonging to FCP as well.
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[Chris Harlan] “I think you guys are all making way too much out of this. I totally get where you are coming from, especially the AE folk. AE folk have always crapped on Motion, and probably rightfully so.”
I did some good work with Motion. Contrary to what one might think from my posts here, I don’t dislike Motion. I just don’t consider it comparable to Ae, and that’s ok. Different tools for different purposes.
[Chris Harlan] “I can only say that for me, at the time, it WAS a revolutionary tool. It was really cool to get near realtime feedback on a G5. Behaviors were fun to play with. I really enjoyed using it. It made creating GFX fun again. Oh, oh. See, maybe the X parallel isn’t so far off.”
This is exactly the point here: that FCPX and Motion are alike in some interesting ways.
I think that Motion succeeded in meeting its design goals: giving its users the ability to do good-looking motion graphics more quickly and easily than before. Motion just never won broad acceptance in the professional design space.
Does that make Motion a bad product, or does that doom FCPX? Absolutely not. It’s just a possible model for a scenario where FCPX does not become legendary in some circles. Nothing more.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Chris Harlan] “I think the reason that this whole conversation seems odd to me is that I perceive Motion as being part of FCP and one of the reasons I like FCP so much. I think of Soundtrack Pro as belonging to FCP as well.”
Totally.
Similarly, I think Pr will gain traction because they have After Effects in the suite (and Adobe is putting in yeoman’s work on Pr).
It makes a lot of sense.
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[Shawn Miller] “Honestly, you can still get poked at by Nuke, Fusion, Flame, Inferno and Shake (yes, Shake) artists for admitting to using AE for compositing. “
Yeah, I’ve seen that first hand, but not for a few years. I particularly remember a Fusion guy snorting aloud when somebody mention AE. Of course, that was in a very different decade.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Similarly, I think Pr will gain traction because they have After Effects in the suite (and Adobe is putting in yeoman’s work on Pr). “
Let me rephrase:
Similarly, I think Pr will gain traction because it’s in the suite with After Effects (and Adobe is putting in yeoman’s work on Pr).
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[Chris Harlan] “I think the reason that this whole conversation seems odd to me is that I perceive Motion as being part of FCP and one of the reasons I like FCP so much. I think of Soundtrack Pro as belonging to FCP as well.”
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if thats the “plan” for X as well. You can already right click on many generators and effects in the browser and choose to “open in Motion” or “open a copy in Motion”. Large chunks of Motion are already built into X, it’s probably not too much of a stretch to think they’ll add that “open in Motion” ability to effected clips in the timeline.
And audio wise, all the Logic plug-ins are already there as well. And roles can be nicely organized into tracks, X2Pro does it really well. How cool would it be to choose to “open in Mixer” and have it pop up in a Logic style window all organized for you? So you can dispense with worrying about tracks and patching and al that crap while editing, and just pop into the other “mode” to mix it? One can dream I guess, but it seems like a lot of the groundwork is there to do something like that…
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Similarly, I think Pr will gain traction because they have After Effects in the suite (and Adobe is putting in yeoman’s work on Pr).
It makes a lot of sense.
“Yeah, that’s what has got me into the CS6. I like that whole concept, and I like working in it. I cut some nice action spots in Pr from a series I’d been cutting in 7 and really liked it.
The Suite aspect of Avid is not quite as well developed, but its kind of fun for me to be back in AvidFX since I did a lot of Boris work early on. I wish there were tighter integration, though, between ProTools and MC.
So, yes–I hadn’t really thought about it much, but the suite aspect is very important to me. Maybe if X irons out the few kinks that keep me away and integrates with something like Logic, I’ll take it for a serious sled down the hill.
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[Chris Harlan] “I’ve done quite well with Motion. So I get peeved, a bit, when people speak ill of her, even when she probably deserves it.”
I think that we have a little bit of the same phenomenon we see with FCPX, where people who like Motion are generally not inclined to spend a lot of energy on threads like this, whether because saying nice things puts them in an uncomfortable position, or because they’re busy just USING the thing.
The most-viewed clip in the Creative COW Videos section isn’t one of the tens of thousands of demo reels or shorts — it’s the commercial that Stephen Smith made for his COW training DVD “Moving with Motion.” Even though he did this in 2009, and DVD training as a whole is obviously no longer where the business is mostly at, we’re still selling quite a few of these, and people are providing very positive feedback.
I have a front-row-ish seat to some of this. My predecessor as the Boris RED product manager actually left to become the head of the team for what became Motion. (He was especially proud of the particle engine, which he felt was Motion’s stealth technology, powering many other feeatures that don’t look anything like particles.) In the Boris office, I sat next to Gabriele de Simone, an early adopter of Quartz technology who left Boris to start Noise Industries.
(He also lived around the corner from me, and signed my will as a witness. LOL I love this guy.)
And as a plug-in developer, Boris has obviously been working closely with Adobe since he shipped his first product in 1995, and his After Effects plug-ins remain among the most popular. You can’t even imagine how skilled those guys are with AE’s most intimate creative and technical features, and I spent a ton of time visiting AE groups for him. Needless to say, Boris also opened up a line of Motion plug-ins.
Not shocking, since Boris pioneered keyframeless vfx in 1995. This was a big part of why I bought the very first version – it was just eeeeeeasier than AE, which I still used for jobs that required *precision.* That to me is the threshold — the more you need precision, the more likely that your motion graphics needs will be met better by After Effects. (At least among the options we’re most immediately talking about here.)
There are a bunch of other sides my perspective of this, including working with vfx technologists in titling, compositing and 3D animation when I was at Avid….where Steve Bayes was part of hiring me, then left to wind up in my old job at Boris, then moved to Apple to become the Sr. Product Manager of FCP, the position he still holds.
(BTW, we almost never talk about the irony of Avid Symphony’s original primary product designer now being the Sr. Product Manager of FCPX, but it’s true.)
My typically overlong point being, I was a paying customer for all of the above, for use in my own video production company, and worked as a corporate weasel for and with guys working on ALL this stuff. It’s a big freaking world, except when it’s a crazy small one, and there a ton of great choices in it. Motion is definitely on the list, and for some tasks and users, it’s a stupendous choice.
But I think that Apple underestimated the value of precision for motion graphics artists. It doesn’t matter if they can work ten times faster to get work that’s really good, if they can’t get EXACTLY what they need.
Video will never have the complexity of more than intro-level mograph, and the relationships between the pieces are fairly straightforward. It’s much more amenable to what FCPX is trying to do for editing than Motion hoped to do for mograph, but balancing the needs for precision and speed are the same.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW
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