Enlighten me on why Motion is better than After Effects or not

[David Mathis]

Just attempted to bring in BMCC raw footage with the result of it being brought in as an image sequence, playback was a bit choppy. Frames were skipped, don’t think they were dropped. So it looks like transcoding is necessary.

When life gives me lemons, there are two ways I look at it: As lemonade or a gas guzzling clunker that could fall apart on me at any moment. I prefer lemonade.

[Shawn Miller]

[David Mathis] “Just attempted to bring in BMCC raw footage with the result of it being brought in as an image sequence, playback was a bit choppy. Frames were skipped, don’t think they were dropped. So it looks like transcoding is necessary.”

Ah, good to know. The upside is that you may not need RT playback for certain things, like keying. Better to at least have the option. 🙂

Shawn

[Walter Soyka]

[Herb Sevush] “I sorely miss the ease of throwing some fades onto a clip without resorting to key framing”

Anything that you can do with a behavior can be written as an expression.

After Effects ships with pre-written expressions saved as animation presets which allow you to fade layers without keyframing. Search the Effects & Presets panel for “fade” and you’ll get a few drag-and-drop presets:

Fade In Over Layer Below
Fade In+Out – frames
Fade In+Out – msec
Fade Out Over Layer Below

These should save you some time and frustration.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Walter Soyka]

[Marco Feil] “The Integration of Motion titles, generators and effects with Final Cut X is really great, I use it all the time. I prepare a lot of titles and effects for other editors so they can adjust colors, text, blendmodes and more on the fly. “

I do really like the FCPX/M5 rigging setup. I moved a couple projects off of FCP7 over to FCPX/M5 for this feature.

But then Ae/Pr CC added live text templates [link], where you could adjust text from Ae comps inside of Premiere. I developed technique for hijacking that feature for rigging [link], using expressions in Ae driven by the Premiere live text template fields. Now I can support rigged templates on Apple and Adobe software.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Herb Sevush]

[Walter Soyka] ”
After Effects ships with pre-written expressions saved as animation presets which allow you to fade layers without keyframing. Search the Effects & Presets panel for “fade” and you’ll get a few drag-and-drop presets:”

Thanks, as always you are a fountain of useful information.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[David Mathis]

Doubt this would ever happen but expressions in Motion would be nice. I remember in AE you could save an expression into a program like Text Edit and anytime you needed it just simply a matter of pasting it back over. Really useful for those long expressions.

[David Mathis]

I wish X would work with the files in their native format. Rendering is a pain in the caboose.

[Shawn Miller]

[David Mathis] ” I remember in AE you could save an expression into a program like Text Edit and anytime you needed it just simply a matter of pasting it back over. Really useful for those long expressions.”

Yes, absolutely. You can also save expressions in an animation preset – very useful.

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/expression-basics.html#save_and_reuse_expressions

Shawn

[Walter Soyka]

[Herb Sevush] “To me Motion is an “editors” tool and AE is an “EFX/Compositors” tool.”

There’s a lot to this statement. I’ve referred to Motion countless times here as offering a high floor and a low ceiling, whereas Ae has a low floor and a high ceiling. I think Herb might be expressing a similar idea here.

Whether you’re an editor or a designer, if you give yourself 10-15 minutes to produce a graphic from scratch, chances are you’d get a much better result from Motion. You can start from a pretty good template, you can have realtime previews while you work, you don’t have to think about keyframing ever if you don’t want to. That’s the high floor.

But as a motion designer, I don’t use Ae in quarter-hour chunks of time. I use it as my primary tool for days or weeks at a time on a project.

I like Motion. I’ve been using it since version 1, though my usage has dropped off a lot with versions 4 and 5. It’s a great tool, built with a great philosophy. I certainly don’t mean to call Motion a toy, but when you approach Ae and Motion for complex work, full-on mograph — beyond the titling, transitions, or effects work typical in editorial — you find that Ae has industrial-strength scalability in a way that Motion does not. That’s the low ceiling.

Bad analogy: Motion is a sketchpad, Ae is the whole studio.

What’s the difference? After Effects has tools for managing complexity. Motion does not. One very clear example of this is groups vs. precomps. Although they are often used in the same way, they are not the same thing at all. Motion’s one timeline per project design is a crushing organizational limitation.

Motion’s behaviors can provide very rich and expressive animation, especially when layered, but they still lack the power of program flow control that expressions can provide. Motion’s lack of scripting severely limits automation potential, meaning that pretty much everything you do in Motion must be done by hand.

To provide a sense of scale with respect the way we use Ae for motion graphics, I collected some stats over the major motion graphics pieces we produced last year. Here are the median results:

Project Items: 632
Project Folders: 38
Movies: 11
Stills: 172
Solids: 59
Comps: 245
Layers: 2,704
Shape Layers: 686
Text Layers: 235
Effects: 853
Modified Properties: 31,752
Total Properties: 456,858
Keyframes: 10,818
Expressions: 7,062
Max item reuse: 21
Max comp reuse: 9
Max Precomp Depth: 6

The biggest single project we did last year had 8,163 layers in 319 comps. It had 18,192 expressions. It had 122,509 properties modified from their original values. It had 541,648 keyframes.

Also in the last year, I’ve also written 2,826 lines of code for scripting After Effects, extending its functionality and improving our workflow, and programmatically making a bunch of those half-million keyframes.

I’m not trying to engage in chest-thumping. These figures just show the different natures of our jobs. I’m sure we’d see a complementary disparity between my work and the groups’ in NLE project complexity if we compared them.

I am trying to show some real-world, full-time usage of Ae. I view After Effects as a complete visual design and development environment, capable of providing me the tools to solve nearly any problem I come across. While Ae and Motion are comparable for simpler tasks, I cannot imagine how I’d keep my sanity and meet my clients’ expectations with Motion alone.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Herb Sevush]

[Walter Soyka] ” It had 541,648 keyframes.”

OK, I give up. How do you count the number of keyframes in a project?

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf