-
Enlighten me on why Motion is better than After Effects or not
-
[Herb Sevush] “OK, I give up. How do you count the number of keyframes in a project?”
I tried using my fingers, but I gave up after 10 and then wrote a script to do it.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
I wonder if the Radeon 5770 card is not the best option and whether to go with a GTX 780 instead.
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.
-
I use both, and it depends on the job as well as who I am working with. Dynamic linking in AE is great and Motion lacks this really great feature. You can share projects into FCP X, but its not nearly as flexible as AE. However, Camera behaviors in Motion make animating a scene with the camera a breeze. Especially when time is a factor, camera behaviors save hours of time, especially if lots of unexpected changes are involved.
Jonathan Sutton
Video Editor
The American College Video Studio
https://vimeo.com/theamericancollege -
Watching the superb owl game last night, in the third quarter, NBC ran a stats animation using the “city” template from Apple Motion, almost unchanged from defaults. Which is why i recognized it. 🙂
-
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
You can import a Motion project file into another Motion project file. There is your pre-comp behavior you want. You just drag and drop the other project file into the one you are working on and it becomes a group.
The Mac OS has had AppleScript for many years, coupled with an app to create automation throughout the entire system called Automator. Motion is also based on XML. So there is a lot more scripting and automation ability than you think. For example, someone had Final Cut Pro X text them through the Messages app when their render was finished. As far as batch rendering Motion projects, you can use Compressor to do that, along with scripting.
There is also a Custom parameter behavior that lets you do a lot of customizing.
Motion 5 lets you import .txt and .rtf files for your text too so you can do things like just changing a text file and then dragging the motion project files to Compressor for a batch render without having to even open up a project.
The rigging in Motion 5 and Final Cut Pro X is more powerful. It does so much more than text. Pretty much any object and any parameter can be rigged in Motion 5 and then selected in Final Cut Pro X. That’s why there are a TON of impressive templates available for FCP X that are very inexpensive, and they are very customizable in FCP X.
I’m not saying everything you are doing in AE with scripting by hand can be done in Motion, I’m saying that there is more ability than “pretty much everything you do in Motion must be done by hand.” That’s not the case.
-
[Scot Walker] “You can import a Motion project file into another Motion project file. There is your pre-comp behavior you want. You just drag and drop the other project file into the one you are working on and it becomes a group.”
Groups and precomps are fundamentally different, though. Sometimes groups are better than precomps, but organizationally, the one-timeline-per-project thing is incredibly constrictive. The workflow you describe does not lighten the organizational burden that Motion imposes.
[Scot Walker] “The Mac OS has had AppleScript for many years, coupled with an app to create automation throughout the entire system called Automator.”
Sadly, Motion 5 presents no AppleScript dictionary.
[Scot Walker] “Motion is also based on XML.”
Yes, and the file format documentation is awesome. It is an example for other developers to emulate!
Unfortunately, though, there is a lot of useful information not covered by the file format documentation. The lack of that information severely limits what you can reasonably accomplish with programmatic XML modification.
Having written a few in-house utilities that work on reverse-engineered application data formats, I can tell you that it’s much, much nicer working with a scripting interface such as Ae provides than parsing and modifying project file data directly.
[Scot Walker] “The rigging in Motion 5 and Final Cut Pro X is more powerful. It does so much more than text. Pretty much any object and any parameter can be rigged in Motion 5 and then selected in Final Cut Pro X. That’s why there are a TON of impressive templates available for FCP X that are very inexpensive, and they are very customizable in FCP X.”
I absolutely love this feature. It’s really well-done.
I’ve also developed a workflow that gives Ae/Pr users a part of this flexibility:
https://www.keenlive.com/renderbreak/2014/06/rigging-ae-comps-with-the-new-templates-feature/Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
This was well said and very helpful Walter. Thank you for the comment. Especially the high floor, low ceiling analogy used for Motion. I started using AE first with some compositing projects, but then later wanted to just get some quick and dirty effects in the timeline that I am exploring with Motion. However, when it comes to keyframing and compositing work, there is nothing like AE. I tried another plug-in, SliceX, to use in FCPX, but it does not come close to working like AE.
-
[Herb Sevush] “however the inability to “send to Motion” from within X is another nail in that coffin for me.”
I know this was posted back in January, Herb – but Wes Plate of Automatic Duck just pulled that nail.
XSendMotion was announced at NAB and will be out in a month or so.
Looks Awesome.
The demo video from the FCPeXchange is coming soon.
FWIW
New signature under construction and coming soon. Please stand by…
-
[Bill Davis] “I know this was posted back in January, Herb – but Wes Plate of Automatic Duck just pulled that nail.”
One less nail then. Excellent.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf -
I think the “send to motion” problem will soon be solved: https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1798-automatic-duck-announce-xsend-motion-get-final-cut-pro-x-timelines-into-motion-5
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up