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Is anyone using Motion?
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[Marcus Moore] “The only time Ive used AE in the last few years has been for 3D Camera tracking, a feature which I’d very much like to see make it’s way into Motion- natively or as a plug-in.”
Just as a little FYI.
https://youtu.be/2QjJ8jR60Ys
Next to the also upcoming camera tracker, yes.
https://youtu.be/-4hlGQ3on3c
?– RK
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[Oliver Peters] “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.”
This is what I’m referring to when I say that in 25 years I’ve never encountered a Motion project or person. In our collaborative business ease of workflow is everything. I regularly receive motion graphics projects from motion graphics artists. Their talents are essential and I’m always appreciative of their work but often the end client requests small tweaks that I can do as the editor. Therefore, the collected AE project will be sent to me so that I can make changes to renders.
This workflow is very efficient and smooth. And yes, it’s also often that one motion graphics artist passes a project onto another artist and that too is easy and efficient when it’s an AE project because of the fact that AE is the industry standard program.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
http://tallmanproductions.net -
[greg janza] “This is what I’m referring to when I say that in 25 years I’ve never encountered a Motion project or person.”
? ??♂️
We’ll just ignore the fact that Motion hasn’t even been AROUND for 25 years nor did hardly anyone even know AE existed 25 years ago and simply quote what a great man once said…
“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.”
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I will, in the parlance of our times, “just leave this here”.
In the quest for “the best tool for the job” we often inadvertently skip over the advantages of using several tools for the same job.
Simon Ubsdell
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The question was whether people are using Motion. I’m sure there’s folks out there using the program and I’m sure they’re making great motion graphics with it. That’s not what was being asked. My interpretation of the original question was whether Motion is being used in the real world by professionals.
You volunteered that there’s a lot of projects that could very easily be done in Motion and that the program is inexpensive to boot. I’m sure that’s true. My point simply was that I personally haven’t worked with any motion graphics artists that use it and over the years, I’ve worked and collaborated with many companies and motion graphics artists in my market.
And I’m sure there’s a fair number of folks who use Motion and are happy to not be giving Adobe their money. Good for them. However, since Adobe CC is a nominal cost it’s kind of pointless to argue the cost savings.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
http://tallmanproductions.net -
[greg janza] “I’m sure there’s folks out there using the program and I’m sure they’re making great motion graphics with it.”
Anecdotally, I’ve actually worked with a couple of designers who did use Motion instead of other apps. But ironically, that was back in the FC Studio days. Nothing since FCPX. I’ve also worked with a few who have used Photoshop for animated lower thirds and such. So there is a lot of variety out there. But of the strong AE artists I do work with, I’ve had little luck in getting them interested. I’ve shown them Simon’s tutorials and they are really impressed, but it never seems to get past that.
There are simply certain tools that are “standards” in specific segments. For example, if you do a lot of large corporate presentations, the live keynote screen graphics behind the stage presenter are largely created with – and played back from – PowerPoint. Not some video MoGfx application or a typical broadcast graphics tool. Go figure.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Tim Wilson] “Can you tell what you’re doing with it? What about Motion was so compelling that compatibility with Motion was your go-no go for adopting X?”
Hahahaha I know it sounds crazy Tim, I admit it. I wasn’t really doing anything super over the top, just making dollar bills fall from the sky, glowing radioactive signs, but clients seemed to like stuff I was coming up with in it.
I could do anything that came to mind with it and I really hadn’t trained on it at all. I found it simple to use and It allowed me to do more than simple cutting in the timeline.
I didn’t know much about X when it came out but I heard from some people that it was a toy and not a real NLE. I thought if it were a toy it wouldn’t need Motion and Apple would kill it and I would go back to Avid and start working with AE.
Once I saw that they had a new version of Motion to go with it I figured X might not be a toy, so I decided to try it.
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[Tony West] “Hahahaha I know it sounds crazy Tim, I admit it. I wasn’t really doing anything super over the top, just making dollar bills fall from the sky, glowing radioactive signs, but clients seemed to like stuff I was coming up with in it.”
Tony, nobody is ever going to get mograph judgement from me. I started working with the first version of Boris FX in 1995, when the hottest feature was DVE cubes. LOL Easy to laugh at now, but for local spots, I had HUGE demand for this kind of thing, and made redonkulous amounts of money with it.
When I started working with Boris (the man AND the company) in the late 90s, I helped develop the preset library. A TON of the DVE presets were cheesy, not because Boris (the man, the company AND the product lines) was especially cheesy, but because I got on the phone and called many hundreds of customers and asked what they needed. The answer was frequently some variation of “more cheese.” LOL
(This was before email was widespread, and many facilities forbade the internet in production studios for fear of viruses. If I was going to speak to actual users, it was the phone or nothing. And I do mean MANY hundreds of phone calls.)
I’ll give you an example. When we introduced a number of includes shapes to use as graphic elements for lower thirds, masks, 3D extrusion, etc., one of ’em was a heart. Pathetic, right? LOL My phone started ringing off the hook — “Man, I’m beggin’, build me a whole category of heart presets. Valentine’s Day is coming up, and my boss/client/news director/morning talk show host is demanding more heart graphics and transitions.”
Done. I created a couple dozen of these, enough to show what you could do with them as masks, using the masks to build transitions, mapping video to extrusions, and so on. All for free, if you give us your email address. You will probably not be shocked to hear that this was our most successful harvesting of email addresses in company history.
People need what they need, even if they don’t WANT to need it. LOL Even if they want desperately NOT to need it. This is also why they don’t want to waste time building this stuff themselves. It’s not what drives them creatively, but it’s going to drive revenue, or at least get someone off their back — and what should ANY software developer care more about than helping customers make money and relieve pain?
And this is why I loved Motion from when I first saw it, a year before it launched, before the product even had a name — which, I will note again, was developed by my predecessor at Boris FX!!!! I didn’t work with him at Boris at the same time, but I’d bought Boris FX on the day it was launched at MacWorld Boston 1995, and as a customer who used it a ton, wrote tutorials for it in the COW’s first incarnation, then eventually as full-time outside demo artist, I spoke to him quite regularly.
Many of the concepts at the heart of Motion are concepts that he first developed when he was at Boris — auto-animation (applied motion effects do something before you add any keyframes), auto-keyframing, libraries of graphic elements, presets out the wazoo….I could go on and on, but virtually EVERYTHING I saw in early Motion came DIRECTLY from what he’d learned at Boris.
How was I not going to love it? And envy the ever-loving shit out of it. LOL
Right after that, and before Motion’s official launch, I had moved from Boris to Avid, and guess what I encountered when I began working with hardcore broadcast and film editors? Requests for more presets, more automation, more graphic elements.
Maybe the film crowd wanted fewer DVE presets, but you better believe that many of the broadcast guys had already installed the heart presets from Boris. LOL
I’ll tell you one more story from the dawn of time to underscore why I never prejudge anyone for what they do or don’t do with mograph. If you work for a living, your art HAS to be driven by commerce, and clients often have terrible taste. LOL
Elastic Reality is a company that invented morphing as we know it. It existed in the precursors of film going back to the early 1800s, but a lot of people, including me, first saw it on a large scale in Willow in 1988. (Look up “Willow morphing scene” on YouTube, and watch how fast YT autocompletes it for you — this still looks incredible.) That was done by ILM, but they did it the hard way. The guys from Elastic Reality wanted to make it easy, and they succeeded. They won a Technical Academy Award for it, too!
Turns out that you can’t make enough money *only* selling high-end VFX tech, so they sold a consumer version of it that was FANTASTIC. They also productized their morphing technology into a set of DVE transitions called Transjammer that evvvvvverybody had. Maybe you wouldn’t use the Falling Cows transition — which, as you might guess, filled up the screen with falling cows LOL — but you might use the variation with falling dollar signs. Or the incredibly high-quality ripples and bulges and such, which weren’t treated as distortions, per se, but warped transformations.
Elastic Reality’s “Willow moment” came in 1994, with two movies. In Forrest Gump, there’s a feather that lands on Forrest’s shoe. The real feather just wasn’t cooperating LOL so Zemeckis brought in the guys from Elastic Reality to perform a morph to make it land juuuust right. And in Stargate (which I think holds up really well!), they used morphs to animate the masks on and off the Egyptian soldier god thingies. (I said that the movie holds up, not that it makes any more sense. LOL)
So what was Elastic Reality promoting in 1993 that made Hollywood come calling in such a big way? THIS, their 1993 demo reel.
I’m not a fan of high-brow/low-brow distinctions in much of nuthin’. I’ll tell you about my Ivy league graduate degree if you make me, but you’ll have to yell loud enough for me to put down my book about teenage vampires in love to answer you. LOL
But I really REALLY don’t want to hear anything from anybody about the “right” way to do mograph. LOL
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Wow, such a long thread I decided to add another post to it…
In the course of creating these effects for use in Final Cut Pro I’ve come to know Motion well and there’s quite a lot that you can do with it (and it’s still pretty fast on my mid 2015 MacBook Pro, and it costs less than buying one sushi dinner for my family : )
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdk-f1rJLpo
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKUwCQ36aTI
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6rDaMpEqo4
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzo4b4SZ3JgThe combination of Parameter Behaviors (such as Link) and the “Rigging” feature is actually very powerful, way more powerful than most people would think (I suspect it’s probably more powerful than people at Apple would think)
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[Dirk de Jong] “Wow, such a long thread I decided to add another post to it…
In the course of creating these effects for use in Final Cut Pro I’ve come to know Motion well “
Ladies and gentlemen, Dirk De Jong, aka my one tether to sanity while working at Boris FX. LOL
I don’t ever want to drag anyone else into my nonsense just because they ever worked at a company at the same time I did, but he’s definitely one of the most creative guys I’ve ever worked with. (As well as kind, generous, hilarious, and killer music taste.) In addition to Simon Ubsdell at Hawaiki, one of the FX Factory developers you really need to pay attention to is Dirk at King Luma.
Our colleague Gabriele de Simone was a few desks away from us, banging away on Apple’s new Quartz display technology, and felt it offered a lot more than OpenGL, but Boris insisted on a cross-platform solution. (Ironically, since Boris was the most adamantly Mac person I may ever have met.)
Gabe was a neighbor of mine, lived around the corner, and witnessed the version of our wills that my wife and I updated before heading to Rome (with a day trip to see Gabe’s peeps in Sorrento)….
…but not at all pleased with the thought of wasting his time on OpenGL when Quartz was singing her siren’s song, so he left Boris FX to found Noise Industries and FX Factory.
(So yes, Boris FX was the seed bed for both Motion and FX Factory!)
I’m very happy to have an excuse to talk about some of this stuff again. Filters, presets, included assets, and extensibility for the kinds of work people do every day is what drew me to Boris FX as a customer, and advocate, and a developer, and it’s what made me flip for Motion, too. I love that folks like Simon and Dirk are out there still making it better.
Note how I stopped before adding, “even if Apple isn’t” LOL since for all I know, a fantastic new version is right around the corner.
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