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iDraw and Motion
I have been considering making a purchase decision and have a few simple questions. I have been looking at adding iDraw to my home studio. Is there any standard workflow getting images from there into Motion? Going to do very basic motion graphics, text usually done in Motion but sometimes in the other software. Any help is greatly appreciated. Have a great weekend!
camera operator | editor | production assistant
Remember kids, tracks are you friends when you charge by the hour. Track Tetris, game on!
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8 Replies
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I have no Adobe programs, only iDraw and Pixelmator. Doing fine with FCPX and motion.
All vector stuff I get from outside, goes into iDraw and clean up, then output as PDF. Add these to motion and turn off the fixed resolution in the media window. Now rescale to whatever and never loose quality.
Have a nice ride! 🙂
Helge
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Excellent. You mentioned output as PDF, thought you should save it out as PSD, just curious if there is any meaningful difference between the two options.
I also have Pixelmator, great little application, though it comes with destructive editing. Then again at the price point and the target audience this is a rather minor caveat. Love the fact it launches fast, seems very stable and has a nice UI, and the price is great, too.
Thought about adding Acorn down the road, and might do that but it looks like iDraw and Pixelmator should suffice for now. Good to know there are great alternatives at a price that won’t break the bank.
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[David Mathis] “You mentioned output as PDF, thought you should save it out as PSD, just curious if there is any meaningful difference between the two options.”
PSD is a rasterized, pixel based format while iDraw’s PDFs are vector based, so you can scale them without quality loss.
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Hi, you can do it as PSD, but then you loose the vector part.
Coming from iDraw the whole point is to get it as vector and not bitmap.
Going the PSD route, you get only bitmap.
Helge
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Thanks to everyone who has replied and very much appreciate your assistance.
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I think the “save layers” are rather neat.*
*first message here on cow
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[David Mathis] “though it comes with destructive editing.”
If saved in its own file format, then it is no more or less destructive than PS.
I personally rarely use PDF as the I/O format, since it makes for an uneditable file. Not the thing I want when working with curves/shapes. I run it through “Motionize” (https://scottash.com/motionize/) and get Motion SHAPES from it. It’s a tad fiddly, more work and not always 100% in translation (in which case you can always opt for PDF after all), but very much worth it IMHO.
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The destructive part comes from PS smart layers. Added many versions ago, if you convert a layer to a smart layer, you can add any filter or effect as a live effect just as after effects and motion would. The effects are listed in the layer and can be adjusted at any time. If you’re old school like me, you’re probably used to just duplicating the layer as a backup before you apply a filter. Acorn apparently has these live filters, where Pixelmator is more the equivalent to CS3 or before before PS added smart layers.
Having tried acorn though, I’ll take Pixelmator. Seems more ps like overall. But I’m still rockin my PS and AI CS5!
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