Is anyone using Motion?

[Shawn Miller]

[Robin S. Kurz] “[Shawn Miller] “Sure, if you’re lucky enough to not to have to be compatible with others, then you can pretty much use whatever you want. Not all of us are that lucky.”

So are people saying that they’re actually exchanging native project files with clients and not just the rendered clip? ? Because I have maybe seen that needed a few times on larger scale in-house productions, but never once did I need to myself in my decade+ as an AE user nor seen others do it”

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. In 20+ years of doing this kind of work, I’ve exchanged AE project files with others for a number of different reason; an agency designs a motion graphics package for a campaign and another part of the business wants to use those assets for another project that I’m working on, I design a motion graphics package for an event and a vendor wants to use it for a number of videos they are producing for the company, someone from a different part of the company wants their design team (yes, we have multiple) to use some title cards that I designed for a another group, or vice versa, etc.

[Robin S. Kurz] “[Shawn Miller] “If you’re doing the kind of heavy-duty mograph work that requires a powerful workstation, you’ll probably need something equally powerful for complex Motion or Fusion projects. Multi-layered 16-bit .exr files with deep effects stacks and animations on top will bog down any software application on any platform… ”

Aside from the fact that that isn’t even anywhere close to Motion’s target audience or intended use-case, I’d guess you’ve never actually used Motion or seen it in action? If “Multi-layered 16-bit .exr files with deep effects stacks and animations” is someone’s bread and butter (which I’ll venture to guess it isn’t for anyone here?) and they’re looking at MOTION to do it… erm… not very clever. It’s about being able to do the vast majority of things editors need in the context of editing (but also much more of course, if needed), and that with features such as not needing to render, or making changes as it plays back, and again, it’s brilliant integration with FCP. A level of integration that AE/Premiere can only dream of.”

I think you’re missing my point… it’s not about what Motion can’t do, it’s that big beefy projects require big beefy workstations regardless of application or platform. The suggestion from Winston was that, when users are freed from having to use powerful machines at work, then that will free them to try different software at home on less powerful hardware… my point (again) is that the need for capable hardware doesn’t change with location.

Shawn

[Shawn Miller]

[Walter Soyka] “[Shawn Miller] “Do you have a favorite among those programs for live event graphics?”

Notch for media server integration, Smode for Ae/C4D familiarity, and Ventuz for data-driven/procedural/broadcast graphics.”

That’s good to know, thank you. I get asked about live event graphics from time to time, but I have next to zero knowledge about these things, so it’s nice to have a starting point for general research. Next time, I’ll just tell them to contact you. ☺

[Walter Soyka] “I think that Unreal is eventually going to eat up most of the real-time market, though. There’s just so much cash behind it, why try to compete as a renderer?”

You’re probably right. For large scale scenes, layout, and real-time raytracing, Katana, Clarisse and others may need to watch their backs! ☺

Shawn

[Tim Wilson]

[Shawn Miller] “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. In 20+ years of doing this kind of work, I’ve exchanged AE project files with others for a number of different reason; an agency designs a motion graphics package for a campaign and another part of the business wants to use those assets for another project that I’m working on, I design a motion graphics package for an event and a vendor wants to use it for a number of videos they are producing for the company, someone from a different part of the company wants their design team (yes, we have multiple) to use some title cards that I designed for a another group, or vice versa, etc.”

The problem with anecdotal stories in any direction is that they always lead to the wrong conclusion. “I don’t need this” becomes “I don’t know anybody who needs this” becomes “NOBODY NEEDS THIS”, or “It’s edge cases only” when “nobody” and “edge case” in this industry could refer to millions of people, and millions of people beyond them in their extended workflows.

(We could certainly think of Avid in this context, but look at the original content on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and all the rest and tell me again about how Hollywood is an “edge case”. )

The lack of insight provided by this sequence of reasoning (I don’t need it >> I don’t know anyone who needs it >> nobody needs it/it’s an edge case) for Motion vs. AE manifests itself when you remember, oh, right, there are many millions more users of After Effects than Motion, and millions of those are making their living as full-time After Effects artists, when relatively few people can be said to making a full-time career in Motion.

To put it another way, the “edge cases” that “nobody needs” are in fact the core features that millions of people have been using for nearly 30 in After Effects for years now — features that these millions of people helped add to the product by virtue of an extremely responsive development team that has aggressively pursued user input. Adobe’s “old school” beta programs still had thousands of people in them, and open betas are now extending that to anyone who wants access.

Not that YOU need those features. Any number of untold millions of people might never need anything in After Effects ever, but the millions of people who DO use it daily, and have for almost 30 years, are anything but edge cases.

The feature set in AE is no doubt unwieldy to people who have a handful of specific tasks to perform, and Motion is one of the many options that many people will find preferable. Good! Prefer it for all the reasons you want to. One of the best reasons to prefer it is that Motion was explicitly NOT developed for full-time mograph professionals. That’s its best feature.

It’s also the feature that makes it unusable for many mograph professionals. Not all of them, of course, but no tool developed for non-mograph pros is ever going to fit the needs of most mograph pros. That isn’t its goal, and it’s not disrespectful to be truthful about this.

What’s disrespectful is assuming that the millions of mograph professionals who are using the deep, dark recesses of AE’s toolset, in a multiplicity of NLEs, are either ignorant or obstinate for failing to choose a tool that was not only NOT developed with them in mind, but developed with the OPPOSITE of them in mind.

I love Motion for what it is, but it’s not for everyone. By design.

[Robin S. Kurz] “But if you’re using FCP then you’d be stupid and shooting yourself in the foot big time if you used AE instead of Motion.”

I don’t agree with that, and I politely and gently contend that more FCPX’ers will agree with me than you.

To flip this around, I don’t think that any AE artist who needs an NLE would be stupid or shooting themselves in the foot if they chose FCPX. They would be sacrificing SOME built-in integration between the two, but if they preferred editing in FCPX, I think you would agree that might more than make up for it, without even having to resort to third-party interchange tools.

The goal is never to take some manufacturer’s word for what the best workflow is, but to combine the best tools for ME, for all of MY tasks, and MY clients, and hopefully not get in my way if I need to expand my workflow beyond their four walls.

Stepping away from my immediate reply to Robin, I’m going to make a larger observation: living inside the wall-to-wall integration with tools from only one vendor? THAT’s the edge case. In practice, hardly anybody does it.

Look at it at the broadest consumer level. Some Apple users believe deep in their bones that the best, nay the ONLY way to live the best life is to combine iPhone, iPad, Mac, iCloud, Apple TV, FCPX, and on and on.

But Apple themselves will never produce a TV spot pointing out the advantages of tying together the iOS experience with Macs because they know that the majority of iPhone customers are NOT using Macs, and never will. If people thought that they NEEDED a Mac to use iPhone, they wouldn’t buy Macs. They’d stop buying iPhones.

I know some “I’d kill everyone I’ve ever met and then myself before I used Windows or Android” people who feel just as strongly in their preference for Gmail, Spotify, and Netflix on their Macs and iPhones and iPads over Mail, Apple Music, and Apple TV.

Sure, there are advantages to integration, but every single day, people opt out of integration in favor of *preference.*

So there are good reasons for people to edit in FCPX, animate in After Effects, and grade in Resolve, or any other way that they care to mix and match (throw in Pro Tools for mixing and Propellerhead for instruments and Sibelius for scoring!) that vastly outweigh the advantages of doing everything using only the tools from one vendor.

No matter how much they all want to say so, nobody has the best in class products in every single category for every use case. The best that they can do for us is enable interop, respect our metadata, and stay out of our way.

[Michael Gissing]

[Tim Wilson} “Sure, there are advantages to integration, but every single day, people opt out of integration in favor of *preference.*”

I would love to switch to the integrated Fairlight in Resolve but I still prefer to use my stand alone version of Fairlight, even though Resolve is my integrated post tool of choice. And I don’t lecture anyone about their preferences in software unless their choice breaks or makes difficult a post workflow that I am part of.

Your observations about preference make it so much more important that we can take timelines between different software vendors which is why I have been critical of NLEs in the past that make this needlessly difficult. Recent discussions about HitFilm reminded me that the last time I looked at it, they didn’t support XML, AAF or OMF export so it was a “please don’t edit with this and ask me to grade in Resolve”.

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “I would love to switch to the integrated Fairlight in Resolve but I still prefer to use my stand alone version of Fairlight, even though Resolve is my integrated post tool of choice.”

I have seen this from every angle myself, as an editor, designer, and a developer.

When I worked at Boris FX, my long suits were FCP (which I started working with in Windows when it was still at Macromedia) and Avid, with a twist of AE. Enough to demo and test our stuff in it, but once I stopped using AE as an artist myself in 1998, I admit that I couldn’t keep up. LOL

I also recruited and onboarded the (then) Sonic Foundry team, although I didn’t help develop the plug in integration for it. I eventually got up to speed on Boris’s integration with Premiere, Sony Xpri (!!!) and a few others, by which point I knew as much about integration as almost anybody on the planet not named Boris. Not a brag. It was my job.

And yet my biggest concentration was the relationship between those plugins and Boris’s standalone product, RED. That was my baby. I learned lots and lots of advantages to plugins standing alone, which is why I was also so delighted to see just last week that Boris has developed and released a standalone version of the venerable plugin Particle illusion.

Because RED was a standalone application, being used by people who also worked with plugins, who obviously, also worked with a variety of host applications, I immediately saw the advantages of Automatic Duck, and began work with West plate and his father Harry on Automatic Duck integration for Boris RED.

(Auto Duck enabled sections of NLE timelines, first Avid, then FCP, to be opened in AE, while retaining things like DVE, markers, filter settings, layers, and more, then bringing something comprehensible back to the NLE. Fiendishly clever stuff, WAY ahead of its time, if now common as a built in feature, largely because of Auto Duck’s efforts.

Talk about an education in interchange, though! Working with Auto Duck to make RED’s timelines (not just rendered output) compatible with all these took me under the hood of the timeline architectures of Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Media Composer and Symphony, as well as understanding the relationships between plugins and standalone compositing for all of these.
And not just things like filter values, DVE, and tracking data, but what it means to share camera data and software lights, which may or may not have any relationship to real lights or real cameras, but might in fact be entirely artificial creations, each unique to its own environment.

It happens that my predecessor in product management for Boris RED left to develop a super flexible real time particle and compositing system for Discreet. His entire team was bought by Apple, and that product was released as Motion. I was working in the Apple booth at NAB the year before Motion was released, and he gave me a preview on his laptop. The product didn’t have a name yet or even an interface. It was running in a shell, but it was jaw dropping.

That was the same year I saw India Titler further down the floor, and was clearly not the only one to think “Wow, real-time particles and procedural media combined with real-time procedural textures on titles, that would make a dynamite combination! ” LOL

So then I wound up at Avid. Lost now to the sands of time is a suite that I led the product marketing for, that is to say not the engineering, and it wasn’t my idea, but the product development and release, called Avid Xxpress Studio.

We were starting to put this together at the same time that Apple was working on Final Cut Suite, its first name, now also lost to the sands of time. Neither of us was copying the other. We were both running terrified of Adobe, with a bigger software user base than Apple and Avid combined (true then, and true now), and neither of us as yet had a good enough story to answer Adobe.

Apple’s solution of course was to buy a whole bunch of stuff in addition to Motion/Live Type. Spruce DVD, Final Touch, Logic, etc etc. A ton of stuff. Many of you remember this well.

Avid’s solution was likewise obvious in retrospect. A very popular set of NLEs and IO hardware, a very popular audio software and integrated hardware toolset, a 3D application in Softinage XSI and much more.

Remarkably, nobody had ever tried to get any of it working all the way together before! (AAF and OMF, yes. Anything else, not so much.) I traveled back and forth between Montreal, San Francisco and Boston, where the three teams were located, trying to bang it out.

This was a gargantuan effort that was directed from on high, but I was the grunt interfacing with the teams putting it together. I talked to engineers to get Pro Tools hardware talking to Avid timelines as a control surface for the first time ever, creating 3D rigs in XSI (whose long suit had been character animation) that were useful for broadcast animation and titling (ie, the opposite of anything vaguely resembling character animation)…

Oh yeah and an Avid branded version of Boris RED (Avid FX) that would now fit into the mix to answer the mograph, tracking, paint, compositing, and titling pieces. Where I also learned more than I ever wanted to know about integrating DISPLAY processing, thanks to a handful of entirely unrelated OpenGL implementations.

By this point, combining everything I’d learned about timelines, interop, plugins, hardware, software, audio, video, 3D, for Avid, Apple, Adobe, and more, I was it. Nobody was juggling more of it than me.

(I’m skipping the DVD authoring and our unique integrations with SmartSound that I worked with them closely on. I’d been a customer since the 90s, and an still a fan, and yeah, learned STILL MORE about integration from these two. NLE markers to DVD chapters was just the beginning.)

Heck, I was even having to learn about integrated dongles, because the Pro Tools plugins all had their own dongles IN ADDITION TO the dongles for Avid and Pro Tools. Audio guys were used to this. Audio freelancers carried around suitcases of dongles, but I knew that even one dongle was too many for many people, and insisted on just one.

Well, I talked them down to two, which nobody had even tried before. And a ton of people did a ton of work to pull it off, so I called it a victory and moved on

But I wasn’t done yet!

I’m going to take a pause in that story, though, to tell you this one.

I’d already been a road warrior, on the road for 100 days a year or more. I met many of you at some of these presentations going back before the turn of the century at Boris. At one time, I’d presented to every FCP UG on the planet, and most of the ones for Avid, Premiere, and AE…. but travel for Avid Xpress Studio was through the roof. Approaching 200 days on the road that year.

I had a rough time at IBC that year, and was genuinely delighted to see some of my friends from Apple’s road team third row center for my presentation at the historic Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Avid spent a fortune on this thing, too, their big after hours event that year. Two giant Barco protectors worth a quarter million each, filling a pair of 30 ft screens, incredible sound, an open bar, 3000 people, it was insane.

And I ended my pitch the way I always did, emphasizing that Avid’s was “the most complete suite” – the industry’s definitive video editing, the only suite with integrated hardware for video IO and an integrated control surface, the only suite with 3D, and the only suite with Pro Tools.

“Why would you bother with a suite that doesnn’t have ANY of these things when Avid offers THE MOST COMPLETE SUITE right here in Avid Xpress Studio ?” ….I said looking my friends from Apple’s Final Cut SUITE right in the eye. LOL

We’d been giving each other playful grief on the road for years, and they rolled their eyes at me, as well they should have. They really let me have it later, too. “Most complete suite, very clever. Ha ha ha.” All good fun.

Fast forward to NAB the next spring, Apple and Avid across the aisle from each other just inside the front door to the South Hall. Apple’s booth was shrouded in curtains, and had been for the past month. (Yes, it takes a month to set up a major booth.) Five minutes before the doors open, the curtains rise, and a 40 for banner pointing ONLY at Avid reveals Apple’s big news for the show.

Final Cut Suite is dead and gone.

In its place, Final Cut….STUDIO.

We laughed out loud. We’d spent a year beating them up with “Avid Xpress Studio: The Most Complete SUITE, so they turned both barrels on us to face Avid Xpress STUDIO with Final Cut STUDIO. Ya gotta love it.

So for anyone who prefers the name Final Cut Studio, you’re welcome. LOL

Anyway, as all this drama was playing out, Avid bought Pinnacle, for one big reason: the intersection between integration and inter op.

People in our market tend to forget that Avid is even bigger in broadcast than post. They were running the table on digital newsrooms conversions at the time, and newsrooms are INSANELY complex. Avid’s systems designers took sole responsibility for developing turnkey neesrooms that were absolutely bulletproof and tied together, and a typical invoice would have products from as many as 200 companies on it.

Plenty of stuff like wires and connectors, but also switchers, routers, CG, MAM, playout servers, archive and nearchive servers, NLEs and shared editing storage, on and on – and it all had to talk to each other.

Pinnacle offered a lot of pieces like CG and playout servers that Avid was never going to build, so after buying Pinnacle, Avid could offer more streamlined systems from fewer vendors, and keep more of the dough. Nice!

The only part of this I had anything to do with was graphics. I’d become the defacto titling and graphics nerd n chief because I not only knew how Boris FX, XSI, and Avid’s other two titlers (Title Tool and Marquee) fit together, but I also knew After Effects, the defacto animation engine for Pinnacle’s Title Deko. My job was to create a scope of work for integrating sooooome aspect of these.

So I flew to Mountain View from Boston, and figured out before lunch that it would cost more to develop than it would ever make. LOL Oops. Had a great Indian lunch and flew back across the country early. Avid wisely punted and created something new for broadcast graphics.

If you want to see something REALLY cool if there’s ever another NAB, check out Avid’s broadcast graphics solutions. So so amazing… and again, nothing to do with me, but you can in fact add the integration of broadcast graphics and post graphics, and reconciling incompatible approaches to alpha channels, to the stupid integration tricks I had to learn.

Part of the acquisition of Pinnacle was Liquid, a low cost NLE ($1000, same as Final Cut at the time) that completely rewrote the book on integration at that time: video, audio, 2D and 3D titling and animation, and DVD authoring not in one suite, but in one application.

The dev team was in Munich, my counterpart in Pinnacle product marketing was there in Mountain View, but here comes Mr Integration, ME, to run point on the Avid side from Boston. Plus a whole new set of user groups to visit.

I spent a TON of time banging on Liquid, and grew really fond of it. I led the press demos for the rollout under the Avid banner, and was of course fully up to speed on the pluses and minuses on Liquid’s approach to integration vs Xpress Studio (still in charge of that), AND vs Apple and Adobe.

Seriously, NOBODY was deeper into EVERY angle of this than me.

Here’s the last story about this. Liquid had developed such a space age interface that longtime users found it disorienting, so Pinnacle did something I’ve never seen before or since. They had a button in the prefs that let you flip back to classic mode. You lost a ton of features, sacrificed a ton of performance, and kissed much of the integration with other components goodbye, but if you were going hard into the edit itself, muscle memory is worth a lot, right? Flip back to modern mode, or whatever it was called, for when you needed those other features.

Best of both worlds! I have no idea how they pulled off the compatibility between the two modes, but it ROCKED. German engineering, son.

So this one time I spent all morning demoing the shiny new Liquid to a member of the press who Oliver will probably guess from this description. One bullet point right before we broke for lunch was to mention, hey, for people who want to edit in the old way, you can turn on classic mode to edit, then flip back to the modern UI for the rest. I didn’t spend 90 seconds on this out of a four hour briefing. No kidding.

And what was the review? The longest review I’ve ever seen for a product I managed, BLASTING us for not updating the old UI. I screamed at him, “You had to TURN OFF the new, modern interface you said we didn’t have

WHICH WE DO

WHICH YOU KNOW

BECAUSE YOU HAD TO TURN IT OFF. The old interface was just there for compatibility, which is A GOOD THING!!!”

He shrugged and said, “Yeah but you didn’t update the old interface. You’re telling people who LIKE the old interface to pay you for an update that doesn’t give them anything, and I think that’s wrong.”

So I turned my screaming to the Liquid team and said, Look, if you want your customers to go all in on your future, YOU have to go all in FIRST. Burn the old stuff to the ground, or you’re in for a lifetime of this pain, for NOTHING. Worse, every day you spend supporting the past is a day you’re spending preventing your own future from happening. Get out of your own way!

Note that I did not say burn the boats. My metaphor was terrestrial. But the principle is the same. If you know your future, and you only want your customers in that future, you have to remove the option of the past.

Which is why I remain the only person in the COW to have gone on the record supporting Apple’s call to torch FCP classic upon the release of FCPX. Many of you said they shouldn’t have, they didn’t need to, yadda yadda. It’s not true, even a little. I lived it, and I’m telling you, it can’t be done any other way.

Pinnacle stopped this nonsense immediately, and Apple saved itself, and ultimately its customers, a world of pain by sensibly avoiding this pain. Instead, they forced the decision up front. You in or you out? Wise, wise, wise.

Actually, one small PostScript. My insane Avid integration saga lasted three years and one month. I spent that time sitting next to the product manager for Avid | DS, another pinnacle (haha) in integration. Talk about one application that could do it all! It really could. What an elegant beast!

Its fans are adamant that Avid killed DS, and I’m here to tell you it’s not true. They kept it going long, long past its economic viability because those developers LOVED that product. It ultimately died a death of 1000 cuts from Symphony, After Effects, Commotion, eyeon fusion, an upstart grading system called Da Vinci Spirit, and Nuke from below, and Autodesk from above….

…. because in the end, the people who breathed and bled Integration Above All numbered in the dozens compared to millions who were only too happy to use whatever they wanted, for whatever reason they wanted.

ALL OF THIS is why I’m the LAST person to judge anyone’s reasons for any combination of plugins and native tools from allllll the companies, because I know an INSANE amount of how they ALL work together, and don’t, and can tell you a lot more stories about all of it.

Do what makes you happy. Don’t piss on whatever makes someone else happy.

Vendors who make it easy for us to pursue our happiness wherever we can find it make me happy. Vendors who don’t, don’t, but they can’t stop me either. Try as they might. LOL

To somewhat come back to the topic 3009 words later, I do hope that Blackmagic pursues a standalone future for Fairlight and Fusion for people who want to squeeze all the juicy goodness out of those that they can. Pursuing that AND integrated versions is quite doable indeed, as Boris has shown for 20 years.

More options make me happy, which I’ll take where I can get.

[Robin S. kurz]

[Shawn Miller] “I think you’re missing my point… it’s not about what Motion can’t do, it’s that big beefy projects require big beefy workstations regardless of application or platform.”

Actually, you’re missing MY point i.e. Winston’s. Motion is not intended for your “big beefy projects”, period. As well as apparently not being intended for YOU or what it is you seemingly do.

But that said, those “big beefy projects” will still perform exponentially better in Motion, even on old hardware, no “big beefy” needed. “Good average” will do just fine. Fact. Even if that just means 5 frames a second vs. 5 frames a minute. Or did you not watch the videos? Motion has been largely realtime SINCE 2005! AE isn’t even close to that today with even the simplest of projects, 15 years later. Go figure. It’s pretty pathetic and embarrassing actually.

[Shawn Miller] “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. In 20+ years of doing this kind of work, I’ve exchanged AE project files with others for a number of different reason”

Okay then. Then you clearly need to stick with AE! No question about it. All the power to you. You’re a full-time mograph person, therefore you don’t even fall into Motion’s target group to begin with, so the discussion is really completely off-base to begin with. If it’s not meant for you, then clearly it can’t be for you. Makes total sense. No push back from here!

Just like if you need things like macros in your text editor then you obviously need to be using Word. If not, and you’re on a Mac, then Pages is most likely more than enough and clearly the better choice. For financial reasons alone, but also for the sake of speed, design, usability and integration. Exact same difference. Or take color correction as an example. Until FCP 10.4 I was constantly sending projects to Resolve. Since 10.4 I’ve maybe done it once for something very specific. Am I saying Resolve is useless or no one needs it? Of course not! I’m saying that for me, and I know for a lot of other FCP users, the newly introduced color tools are perfectly sufficient if not MORE than enough for 99% of things we need to get done. And staying in FCP is and will always be the best option if available. The only thing I’m missing “natively” are trackable power-windows and even those I have with Color Finale in FCP.

Again, Motion is first and foremost for (fcp) editors that need quick, easy, highly customizable, great looking graphics and animations without ever leaving FCP. The next in line are those that make those graphics and/or plugins for said FCP editors. So, again, if neither the first nor latter describe you or anything you need, then I’d say the entire discussion/comparison is rather pointless. Motion would be a horrible choice for you. 100% agreed! No one is trying to take AE away from anyone. The question is “Is anyone using Motion?”. The if and why.

Because if neither you nor any of the aforementioned colleagues/clients use FCPX, then, as I already said, there’s little point or advantage to using Motion. It’s called “horses for courses“.

[Tim Wilson] “The problem with anecdotal stories in any direction is that they always lead to the wrong conclusion. “I don’t need this” becomes “I don’t know anybody who needs this” becomes “NOBODY NEEDS THIS”, or “It’s edge cases only” when “nobody” and “edge case” in this industry could refer to millions of people, and millions of people beyond them in their extended workflows.”

But then I don’t see where anyone wrote anything even remotely resembling “NOBODY NEEDS THIS”. I know I certainly didn’t. I was merely asking if that’s in fact a high priority since in 30+ years I have rarely seen the need for it myself. Obviously I can only speak to my own experiences?

Mind you, I explicitly asked about exchanging files with clients, not co-workers/partners! Those are obviously two entirely different things. So when’s the last time you had to exchange actual project files with a client? Just as I don’t send original, editable text documents to clients, but rather printouts, PDFs, whatever, I don’t know why I would want to send original project files to a client. If they have the app and can work it (why else would they need them??), then what am I working for them for? ?

[Tim Wilson] “for Motion vs. AE manifests itself when you remember, oh, right, there are many millions more users of After Effects than Motion, and millions of those are making their living as full-time After Effects artists, when relatively few people can be said to making a full-time career in Motion.”

Oh there are plenty of people making a lot of money with Motion. Only they’re doing entirely different things! Ergo: I guess no one actually read and understood my point? Because, again, this (for me) is NOT about AE vs. Motion per se. I love both apps for entirely different reasons, but the comparison at its onset is just silly and utterly futile, as I’ve already said. Nor is it really even the topic/question at hand to begin with. Once again: Motion will not and cannot replace AE nor the other way around. Because it is not nor was it ever intended or positioned in a way to be it. Ever. So why are we talking about “After Effects artists”? They’re irrelevant. Motion is not about the “Multi-layered 16-bit .exr files with deep effects stacks and animations on top” (the usual, exceptional scenario that only concerns 0.1% of users to begin with, AE or otherwise). Because if that’s what you’re doing then, yes, do yourself a big favor and stick with AE!

I am talking about what/who Motion is factually intended for. Again: editors. Editors that are NOT mograph artists nor people making their money off of mograph work, but need mographs, effects (as in filters not VFX), transitions etc. in their projects (which is what? 100% of them?), all of which they can create using Motion in the context of FCP. Not process 16-bit .exr files. You also can’t take Motion out of the context of FCP (as you can so easily take AE out of the context of PPro) since that, by now, is nearly its sole reason for existence: support app for FCP. Never mind that large parts of Motion are firmly integrated into FCP. Which is why you get 100% of Motion’s performance in FCP.

99.9% of FCP’s titles, effects, generators and transitions… are Motion projects!

And still, no one has mentioned a single thing they think you can’t do in Motion, outside of some super-specialty scenario, that 95+% of users i.e. first and foremost editors need. Anything? Because yes, that’s extremely relevant to my point of shooting yourself in the foot for no sensible reason.

[Tim Wilson] “I don’t agree with that, and I politely and gently contend that more FCPX’ers will agree with me than you.”

That’s your prerogative. But unless you can actually show me those users and show me what it is they’re doing (e.g. they are not fulltime or primarily mographers working for others) that AE is factually the better and more sensible choice, then I politely and gently say: you’re wrong. And no, I’m not counting those that merely use AE because they know it better and can’t be bothered to learn Motion. That in and of itself does not make it the better choice overall nor negate the fact that, yes, they are more likely than not shooting themselves in the foot. If not both feet. Otherwise: show me how they’re not. Most of all: show me they actually know Motion and understand what it does and can do, and STILL say AE is the better, more sensible choice.

Are you a fulltime editor, Tim? Do you use AE on a regular basis? Do you use FCPX? Have you ever used Motion in production? I honestly don’t know. Because I would think you’d have to be able to say “yes” to at least two if not all of those to be able to be so confident about that claim, no? I for one can say yes to all. Well, aside from maybe using AE on a regular basis. Not since I quit at Adobe. ? I’m also a certified trainer of all of the above and have been using every one of them since their v1.0.

Need an actual real-world foot-shooting example? One that I encounter in this and similar form over and over and over?

An all FCPX regional news broadcaster here showed me their two weather maps that had three regions in it with 13 possible (animated!) conditions for each region. Rain, snow, sun etc. etc. plus temperatures high/low for each plus an animated background, intro/outro.

(for reference)

They obviously had to make a new version every single day. And what were they doing? They were stacking something like 15+ layers in their timeline to get the result they needed. Different ones each and every time. Do the math! Do you realize how many different assets they had to have available at all times just for that map?? That works out to nearly 300 possible combinations… not even counting the temperatures. Sometimes they were even—you guessed it—rendering it out from AE! Which was clearly even more moronic. And why all of that? Because the mograph dude was plain too lazy and comfortable to simply learn Motion. And everyone else didn’t care since they didn’t have to (and couldn’t) do it themselves and were in awe of his super-skillz (which he enjoyed).

I took those 50+ assets for both maps and made one Motion title from them with merely three pop-up menus for each region to choose the condition from, and one for which map.

That being the first thing that is a complete impossibility in AE, btw.

Obviously, being a title, they could simply edit the temperature in the viewer. At least one thing that you can (finally) do with AE/PPro as of a couple of versions ago, so there’s that.

Then I made a custom transition in the same style of the graphic for in and out. Again, an impossibility with AE/PPro.

All this took me all of maybe an hour. Result: after spending an easy 10+ minutes setting this up before, they were now reduced to seconds. Literally three clicks and three numbers. DONE. With zero rendering, all realtime (in fact the Motion project played in realtime with all 50+ layers active… try that with just two layers in AE), and they (as in: any and everyone there) were able to do it on all not just the previous two machines.

So tell me: how were they not shooting themselves in their collective feet, day in, day out? How was or could AE have been the better, more sensible choice? When, where, and how is it ever in the context of an FCP editor? No, NOT a motion graphics artist.

But if the direct comparison is so important, then show me anything you (i.e. anyone) has done in AE without any specialty filters that
a) I can’t replicate in Motion and
b) can’t do it in a fraction of the time.

So are there as many people making money using Motion compared to AE (if that’s even relevant)? Nope, probably not. But then maybe the question should be how many are saving money using Motion? By doing it themselves or using some of the endless, amazing plugins/templates for Motion/FCP (that far outnumber those for PPro btw) instead of hiring Mr. Super-Skillz? Templates that, again, are literally impossible to make for PPro.

I’d say the scale tips quite favorably to Motion on that. So I guess it’s not quite so black and white.

– RK

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[Greg Janza]

[Robin S. Kurz] ” I haven’t seen anything anyone has put together in AE for any average everyday production in the past many many years that they a) couldn’t have just as well done in Motion, and b) for not only in a fraction of the time, but also for a fraction of the cost, assuming they used Motion for more than 3 months (or just one month, depending on their subscription ?)”

I’m 25 years into my career and I’ve yet to encounter a single motion graphic artist who uses Motion. AE is the industry standard and since Adobe is platform agnostic AE will most likely remain the standard for the foreseeable future. And the arguments that Motion or FCPX are a more affordable solution are laughable at this point.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
http://tallmanproductions.net

[Winston A. cely]

I’m starting to wonder what “industry standard” even means anymore…

It just seems that chunks of the entertainment/broadcast/film world (and whatever niche work is listed under those broader categories) are set in their ways, but that those ways are all varied from each other, and varied even more within their own category. I mean, at what point do we put “industry standard” to bed and recognize that it doesn’t mean much anymore? I may be wrong, but it seems like this phrase used to mean the difference between something looking and feeling professional versus something that was obviously finished by “non-professionals,” but even that doesn’t mean what it used to. See: what constitutes pro-work on YouTube nowadays…

The only thing left is workflow. If this forum has taught me anything, it’s that there is no “industry standard” in a workflow, at least in terms of a single system that covers TV, Film, Web, etc. Some groups may be larger than others, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less or more professional than the next one, and therefore the workflow that one uses compared to the next doesn’t mean anything. Or at least the differences mean much less now than they ever have in the past.

When I started in post back in 2006 (yes, I am a very young pup compared to some of you, and there’s no offense meant in that!!!) there were systems in place that we followed. Often times these systems were used out of habit, not a necessity. It was the industry standard to do it that way, but as we went on, we would constantly ask ourselves is there not a more efficient way to do things? “Yeah, but is that the way everyone does it? No, but it’ll save us time and money and we’ll get the same end product. OK, do it!”

I’ve had this conversation many times with administrators at my school, my professional advisors still working in post-full time, and even other professionals not in our business. We’ve certainly not come to any single idea of what “industry standard” means other than an antiquated catch-all for implying that a workflow component has little to no value compared to another because “no one I know uses it.”

Thoughts?

Winston A. Cely
ACTC Media Broadcasting Video Instructor
Apple Certified Editor FCPX 3

\”If you can talk brilliantly enough about a subject, you can create the consoling illusion it has been mastered.\” – Stanley Kubrick

[Robin S. kurz]

[greg janza] “I’m 25 years into my career and I’ve yet to encounter a single motion graphic artist who uses Motion.

Sorry if I don’t see how that has anything even vaguely to do with my point nor how it poses an answer to a) OR b) in any way, shape, or form. As opposed to merely being diversionary solipsism. But, yeah. Sure. ??

Oh… and maybe try on some motionVFX action, as one of many examples, to encounter MANY extremely talented motion graphic artists who use Motion. Sorry you missed it. ??‍♂️

Let me know how much of what you see you can put together yourself in your “industry standard” and how long it takes you. That being the ACTUAL point here. Since I’m sure you’re an accomplished AE artist that is the best possible judge of what can be considered worthwhile and great motion graphics… right?

[greg janza] “the arguments that Motion or FCPX are a more affordable solution are laughable at this point.”

?… if you say so! Also, let me know if you need to borrow a working calculator.

[Oliver Peters]

[Winston A. Cely] “We’ve certainly not come to any single idea of what “industry standard” means other than an antiquated catch-all for implying that a workflow component has little to no value compared to another because “no one I know uses it.”
Thoughts?”

When it comes to tools, sometimes it boils down to critical mass. If you use the NLE, DAW, or MoGfx tool that the majority of the community around you uses, then a) you have a better chance of getting a job within a company, and b) it’s easier for a project to be moved around and shared.

For example, if the majority of local artists use AE, then it’s easier for a client to use one artist for the original project and receive the project files upon completion. If there are changes months later and the original artist isn’t available, then the client can easily pass the revision on to a different artist.

But in the context of this discussion, there’s no reason not to use both Motion and AE. For example, Motion is great for quick ideation and generating proofs-of-concept. Once you get an idea approved, move to AE for the actual execution if that’s your preference.

Also, it’s not just a Motion versus AE game. HitFilm Pro is a pretty decent AE competitor for many styles of VFX and MoGfx work.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com