Motion and Shake Together – Good AE Replacement?

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Not really, IMO. But they are all excellent and complement each other very well.
Why “not really”? Because sometimes the sum of the parts is not the same as the result. For example, Motion has wonderful text and particle animation and Shake has wonderful compositing and some 3D capabilities. However, having particles and text animation on an application that also does 3D is… After Effects (Not even Combustion combines all these in such a way).

Shake is an amazing compositing application. It does hard things look easy in that field. But for motion graphics… it makes easy things look hard 🙂

This may change now that Apple announced that Shake is dead and they’re working on a next generation product. Probably something that mixes Motion and Shake’s strengths? That really would be a weapon 🙂

However, my opinion is: if you really love visual expression, having a machine loaded with Motion AND Shake AND After Effects is a dream come true. After Effects will be universal sooner or later, and it runs quite decently on Rosetta. So I wouldn’t base my workflow on the universal thing alone. I myself jump between Motion and After Effects all the time for professional motion graphics. Bear in mind that you can now import Motion projects into After Effects and have the best of both.
Hope this helps.

Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com

[Noah Kadner]

In terms of end result- maybe. In terms of workflow/user interface not at all. Shake is it’s own thing totally different from Motion or AFX.

Noah

[Cooljay]

Thanks guys. That’s pretty much the response I was expecting.

I’ve been using Word on a MacBook for a few weeks now, and Office seems to run really slow under Rosetta. The rest of OS X flies, but Office just chugs along. I was hoping to avoid that situation with AE, but it sounds like AE isn’t that slow on a MacPro.

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

AE on my MBP runs under Rosetta at aprox. the same speed AE runs natively on an 1.5 Powerbook. Not that bad if you consider a 1.5 PB was a high end Macintosh laptop last year. Rest assured that Macintosh users are a large size of the AE user base, and Adobe should have something in store for them in a not so distant future, I imagine. Universal binary applications like Motion and Cinema 4D (to name two I use a lot) really fly on this little laptop, even surpassing my Dual G5 desktop. Who would have thought such a thing a year ago?

Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com

[Mrvideo]

I have Shake 4 – AFX7 and Motion 2, and each tool has it’s advantages. The Keyers are about this order – Motion – bottom of barrel – AFX middle of barrel – Shake – top of line.

Motion Tracking AFX lower – Shake higher
Motion Stanbilization – AFX lower – Shake higher
Particles – Shake lower – AFX – middle – Motion highest
3D – Get a real 3D program to build 3D objects and Shake doesn’t need those keyframes to use 3D space like AFX.

Compositing – AFX – bottom – Motion – middle – Shake highest (if the content is not one fixed size)
If content is all one size then Motion moves to the top. (2D only)

It’s really about your workflow and how you use the tools. If you really want to compare tools compare Shake, Combustion and AFX. They all have great keyers and Combustion has great Particles and Paint programs. You wouldn’t use a hammer to drive a screw into the wall would you?