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Deciding whether to swith to PremierePro CS6
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[Danny Finch] “I don’t see much evidence of production companies using Motion over AE. Has it never quite caught on in the profession?”
Motion is very capable, but I think its ceiling is lower than After Effects’s.
I often say that it’s faster and easier to get from 0-80% in Motion than AE, but it’s faster and easier to get from 0-100% in AE.
The big minuses of Motion for advanced motion graphics (in my opinion) are the lack of expressions and scripting, the lack of third-party plugins, the lack of resolution independence, and the lack of available talent pool.
With regard to FCPX/M5, the lack of roundtrip (Send to Motion) is frustrating from an effects standpoint.
On the plus side, though, publishing from M5 to FCPX is very cool, Motion’s behaviors may be easier to understand than keyframing (and Motion still gives you the option to keyframe if you choose), and you can do a good amount of work with realtime rendering on the GPU.
Personally, having used both a good bit, I eventually settled into using Motion predominantly as a titler with all bigger mograph projects going to AE.
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 -
[Danny Finch] “The fact that my Macbook Pro is still running strong after 5 years is proof of why the Mac is the professional standard.”
Danny, I would have agreed with you a year ago, but this line doesn’t fly with me anymore.
I started using a PC as my main workstation (alongside the seven Macs in my office) about nine months ago. Windows 7 running on quality hardware is a great user experience, with the stability, security, and build quality that I was used to coming from Macs. PCs offer far more performance options than Macs do — and that’s critical for render-intensive work like motion graphics and 3D.
Notably with CS6, there are more graphics cards formally supported on the PC platform than the Mac platform, and that makes a huge performance difference for GPU accelerated features.
I am happily bouncing back and forth all day between my Mac Book Pro and the Z800 HP sent me to try in cross-platform workflows. I liked it enough that I have bought additional HP desktops as the basis for my render garden (it’s still too small to be considered a farm).
Macs and PCs each have some unique advantages — and I do believe that not all PCs are created equal — but you really can do quality creative work on either platform. I wouldn’t consider either platform to be more or less professional than the other as a general rule.
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 -
[Walter Soyka] “[Danny Finch] “The fact that my Macbook Pro is still running strong after 5 years is proof of why the Mac is the professional standard.”
Danny, I would have agreed with you a year ago, but this line doesn’t fly with me anymore.”
Sorry, Walter, but he talks 5 years, not several months.
I have both in my environment with different tasks (complete live-streaming setup and digital signage via Windows, Production via OSX) and there is no doubt Apple machines and OSX are better for professional work. There is practically no downtime, there are no driver-issues, there is no servicing. They just work. And whatever machine you build for your Windows….there will be the day when some software doesn´t support your graphics-card driver….you upgrade and mess with another program which needs the old one…..it just happens much more often Windows than in Mac (due to the fact that Mac hardware is indeed only limited in terms of new cards/main boards etc) -
I think another thing to consider about AE, is its scalability. People are doing everything from simple motion graphics to complex, high end visual effects in AE. Not to denigrate Motion at all, I wish it were available on the PC. But you may want to think beyond what you’re being asked to do today, and consider how far you want to go in the future. Maybe Motion gets you as far as you care to go, maybe not. Either way, it probably deserves some thought.
Shawn
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[alban egger] “Sorry, Walter, but he talks 5 years, not several months.
I have both in my environment with different tasks (complete live-streaming setup and digital signage via Windows, Production via OSX) and there is no doubt Apple machines and OSX are better for professional work. There is practically no downtime, there are no driver-issues, there is no servicing. They just work. And whatever machine you build for your Windows….there will be the day when some software doesn´t support your graphics-card driver….you upgrade and mess with another program which needs the old one…..it just happens much more often Windows than in Mac (due to the fact that Mac hardware is indeed only limited in terms of new cards/main boards etc)”Sorry to disagree with your disagreement here, Alban. But this is not my experience with Windows PCs at all. I currently have two 7 year old Dell workstations in my care. Each still performing well, and each only going down for OS/software updates. I also have an 8 year old Windows Server 2003 machine in my care, it also goes down for system maintenance from time to time, but nothing like you’re describing. I have had problem PCs to be sure, but in those cases cheap/bad components and crappy drivers were to blame.
Shawn
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[alban egger] “there is no doubt Apple machines and OSX are better for professional work. There is practically no downtime, there are no driver-issues, there is no servicing.”
I’d like to live on your planet. On mine, however, after 3 Mac Pros a MBP and a mini, I would say hardware downtime is no better than HP or Dell, and hardware options are much more constrained. OSX software issues are fewer, especially viruses, but in order to get that stability you have way, way, way fewer software options. Pick your poison, it’s all pretty much equal. Except I do like color labeling my files – take note Microsoft.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[alban egger] “Sorry, Walter, but he talks 5 years, not several months.”
I assume that you would reject this argument if I made it in favor of FCP7 over FCPX.
I’ve been doing my daily creative work on Macs for 10 years, and I’ve been doing specialty display work on PCs in my shop for 6 years. This is not my first PC, but it is the first time I’ve relied on a PC as my daily workstation. Nine months using Windows 7 as my daily driver is certainly enough for me to say that the experience is so vastly different than XP that my own prior preconceptions are simply invalid.
This machine still feels the same as it did the day I started — just like you’d expect from a Mac. I’m not updating drivers every day, I’m not opening it up and tinkering around. I’m focusing on my work, and the computer is helping get it done while staying out of my way — just like you’d expect from a Mac.
[alban egger] “I have both in my environment with different tasks (complete live-streaming setup and digital signage via Windows, Production via OSX) and there is no doubt Apple machines and OSX are better for professional work.”
No doubt? Those are very strong words. I wouldn’t make such a strong statement with no qualifications.
If you care about power, which is an advantage in high-end motion graphics, then Macs lose. The fastest Mac you can buy today is built on technology from the first quarter of 2011, and it’s half as fast as the fastest PC you can buy today [link].
Why is power an advantage? Schedules and budgets are fixed. The more you can render within that time/budget, the more time you have for development and experimentation. The faster you get results back from your machine, the more creative iterations you can perform in the same amount of time, and the better final result you can deliver to your client.
[alban egger] “And whatever machine you build for your Windows….there will be the day when some software doesn´t support your graphics-card driver….you upgrade and mess with another program which needs the old one…..it just happens much more often Windows than in Mac (due to the fact that Mac hardware is indeed only limited in terms of new cards/main boards etc)”
In 10 years of running my business on Macs, I’ve collected some nasty horror stories. Remember the iTunes 2 update that erased connected external drives? Or the QuickTime update designed to allow movie rentals for iTunes that broke all After Effects renders that took longer to calculate than 10 minutes? Or the 10.6.7 update that wouldn’t boot if you had an NVIDIA Quadro 4000 installed? All that stuff isn’t supposed to happen, because the Mac ecosystem is single-source — and yet things fall through the cracks.
Computers are complicated. Macs and PCs are both complicated. They will fail at some point. With a professional PC workstation, I can buy a support contract that will have an IT support professional in my office within a day. With a Mac Pro, I can lug it through the local shopping mall to an Apple store so they can confirm it doesn’t work, ship it out for repair, and get it back a few days later.
[alban egger] “There is practically no downtime, there are no driver-issues, there is no servicing. They just work.”
This describes my experience with Windows 7, too.
I’m not advocating everyone dump Apple and jump on a Windows machine. I love my Macs, I still use them every day, I’m keeping them, and I’ll certainly buy more in the future.
I am suggesting that anyone who claim that Macs are absolutely “better for professional work” either have a limited scope of what professional work entails or have some incorrect preconceptions regarding working with a PC.
If you replace “Mac” with “FCP7” and “PC” with “FCPX” in the line above, I think my argument will sound familiar to you.
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 -
Why does the decision always have to be Premiere/After Effects or FCPX/Motion? Why not FCPX/After Effects or Premiere/Motion?
Of course if you have CS6 suite you get Premiere anyways so why not Premiere/AE/FCPX/Motion and use whatever fits the job/budget/timeframe etc?
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Irvine, California -
[Lance Bachelder] “Of course if you have CS6 suite you get Premiere anyways so why not Premiere/AE/FCPX/Motion and use whatever fits the job/budget/timeframe etc?
“Very sensible idea, that’s exactly what I do
Steve Connor
“The ripple command is just a workaround for not having a magnetic timelinel”
Adrenalin Television -
[Herb Sevush] “I’d like to live on your planet. On mine, however, after 3 Mac Pros a MBP and a mini, I would say hardware downtime is no better than HP or Dell, and hardware options are much more constrained. OSX software issues are fewer, especially viruses, but in order to get that stability you have way, way, way fewer software options. Pick your poison, it’s all pretty much equal. Except I do like color labeling my files – take note Microsoft.”
I’ve been PC since the dawn of my computing experience and a Mac for a year and a half now, and I agree as well.
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