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Final Cut “Studio 2014″ May 16 by Oliver Peters
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[Simon Ubsdell] “I used to use Photoshop a great deal more than I do these days until it occurred to me that a huge number of the tasks I was using it for were lot easier and more quickly achieved in Motion… A lot of its other features now strike me as hopelessly clunky … and that’s speaking as someone who enjoyed working in Photoshop more than almost anything else.”
Simon, I often take the same approach (but of course with Ae, not Motion).
Photoshop by design encourages lots of fully manual and often destructive operations (even with all the recent improvements with smart objects and smart filters). Motion tools, on the other hand, encourage proceduralism and non-destructive workflows. Using motion tools for stills work can open up lots of possibilities.
I’m even starting to use Nuke a bit for stills (managing mattes in Ps is frustrating — sometimes nodes just seem like the right solution), though I’m not yet as fast with the paint system as I am with Ps.
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
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[Walter Soyka] “I’m even starting to use Nuke a bit for stills (managing mattes in Ps is frustrating — sometimes nodes just seem like the right solution), though I’m not yet as fast with the paint system as I am with Ps.”
Very interesting.
I’m glad I’m not the only one to have started doubting Photoshop’s advantages. As I say, I used to absolutely love working with it but then the lateral thinking involved in doing the same stuff in a motion graphics environment made me question a lot of what I thought.
Of course, as you say, Ae is really just an uber-Photoshop in so many ways and Nuke of course would be that in spades – almost any motion graphics/compositing application is going to have advantages over a Photoshop workflow.
That said, the stuff it does really well it still does better than anything else out there.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “almost any motion graphics/compositing application is going to have advantages over a Photoshop workflow”
Of course, the whole point behind Smoke is to roll all those functions into a single application.
FWIW – the last end credits I built (all stills) were created in the old Motion as individual projects for each page.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Steve Connor] “What an interesting tutorial that would make (hint, hint)!”
Now you mention it …
😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
Oliver,
Nice article. And a timely one since I’ve been working to be CC free.
I did see today that iDraw just got a big update, even though the version number doesn’t seem like it would be a big one…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill
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[Steve Connor] “It is incidentally pretty easy to replicate Photoshop’s layer styles in Motion with a few simple tricks – which is probably the one thing that most users wouldn’t realise.”
What an interesting tutorial that would make (hint, hint)!”
Something like this.
Not at all hard to achieve and because you’re building the tools yourself you have much more flexibility than if you’re stuck with some of the limitations of Photoshop layer styles.
And of course it’s much easier to build animated effects into the “layer style”.
You could even publish a whole range of controls for use inside FCP X so it’s quite an interesting route to go down.
Simon Ubsdell
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[Simon Ubsdell] “As always a really great round-up from Oliver.
One thing that I might add to what he says is that surprisingly Motion is actually a really useful replacement for Photoshop, especially for those frustrated by some of the limitations of Pixelmator.”
I really love working with Motion and after seeing that statement, love it even more. Two things that are missing are expressions and null objects. Those two are only available in After Effects, the other strong point there is using Trapcode Particular for particles, there is no equal. I hope that Apple really considers adding null objects and expressions in the next major release. Until then, for some stuff I will have to rely on After Effects, including particles. That said, there is no question that Motion is really awesome!
I do have Pixelmator and while it is good for something very basic, just not a strong competitor as of now.
One part of my Studio 2014 “package” is stuff from Rampant Design Tools, just pure awesomeness!
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[David Mathis] “Two things that are missing are expressions and null objects.”
Actually, you can easily make null objects in Motion and I use this technique all the time – simply create a dummy shape of your choosing and link whatever you like to it.
Expressions are indeed missing but if you really push the parameter behaviors you can get to a very similar place, as I’ve mentioned before:
Obviously the level of complexity you can achieve with Ae expressions is essentially unlimited – on the other hand, the ease of setting up extremely complex expression-type interactions in Motion can be pretty mind-boggling, on top of which the real-time feedback you get as you work is a massive advantage over Ae expressions … which in my mind makes up for a very great deal.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
“Question for Oliver:
You mentioned something about installing stuff from the app store onto multiple machines you control and own. If my understanding is correct, and I personally own and control an iMac and Mac Pro, then I only need to make a one time purchase of Final Cut Pro and install on both machines?”Yes.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Assuming that Shake will work with Mavericks then I am considering that as a replacement. Sometimes nodes are a better way of doing things. Sad that Apple decided to end Shake like they did. It had potential.
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