Motion Not Upto Snuff

[Mark Maness]

You’re lucky…

I’m noticing some serious issues with Motion3 myself. Credit rolls that looked awesome in FCP 5.1.4 and Motion, but since upgrading… I’m getting some serious screen jitters. It looks like a field rendering issue.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Winston A. cely]

I’ve been sticking with Motion since it first came out. I’m no guru, but I have faith that it will be a great app and something to which will work seamlessly with FCP. However, I’ve not had one version not be buggy in one way or another. Most of the time, it’ll be super buggy on the initial upgrade, and then it’ll relax into quirkiness after an update or two. To this day, I’ve never had the frame rates that others including Apple claim you can get out of Motion. And I’ve used each version with the best available card for Motion. Even doing renders in Motion won’t help. I’ve tried clean reinstalls, wiping drives and reinstalling, and nothing has ever worked in getting me the frame rates I should be getting. Having said that, I lay most of the blame on operator error, but still, should it be that hard to get decent frame rates when you’re only animation two layers of text on top of a layer of HD video with only one filter on it? (extreme case, but it happened) Now it’s not all the time, just most of the time. And I do work many times with clients in the office, but we’ve created a work situation where we’re responsible for first drafts, and the clients only come in at the end. This buys us a little time in the graphics/titling department.

Having said this, I’m not going to switch to any other app any time soon. I have faith that Apple will work out the kinks…. Now if they would just allow us to buy whatever video card we wanted to….

Winston A. Cely
Editor/Owner | Della St. Media, LLC

“If God could do the tricks we can do, He’d be a happy Man.” – Peter O’Toole – “The Stuntman”

Mac Pro 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
4 GB RAM | Final Cut Studio 5.1.4 | Aja Kona LHe

[Tom Daigon]

I am hopefull these issues will be addressed. Im just glad Im in a long term education & evaluation period with the software, so my livelyhood is not reliant upon its performance at the moment.

[Aaron Aphasia]

No it’s NOT up to snuff! I’ve been working on a simple project with moving video boxes and that light brush write-on effect and I keep getting crashes. If it wasn’t for my “Save Now, Save Often” mantra I’d be screwed. My computer is no slouch either (Dual 2 GHz G5 with 2 Gigs SDRAM). I should be tearing this program up! I might just have to switch back to my After Effects just to meet deadline! A

[Tom Daigon]

Hopefully you are given the screen after you crash then sends info to Apple Techs and allows you to describe what you were doing and the system you were doing it on…so they can sort the problems out soon.
Ive been filling mine out religously.

[David Roth weiss]

[Aaron Aphasia] “My computer is no slouch either (Dual 2 GHz G5 with 2 Gigs SDRAM). I should be tearing this program up!”

Aaron,

Sorry to dissapoint, but your computer is pretty much down in the slouch category these days. What graphics card are your running?

“No job is worth doing more than once…”

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Allan White]

Apple seems to have a history of designing software that’s just ahead of the hardware curve. Aaron’s specs are unfortunately not the best for running Motion.

I use it now on a dual G5, 4GB RAM, and Radeon X800XT. It’s a bit of a challenge to keep Motion projects simple enough to render quickly. I would consider this performance sub-par. After Effects + Nucleo Pro is wonderful on this system.

Motion seems to perform *much* better on Intel hardware – the greater memory bandwidth and faster RAM is likely one reason, as are having access to faster cards.

My new Mac Pro arrived yesterday: 4x3Ghz, X1900 card, 10GB RAM. I’m installing FCS2 right now – I’m guessing Motion is going to run a little faster now. =)

Don’t forget to fix your layers’ resolution to the canvas size! That speeds things up quite a bit.

I find Motion great for lower thirds, backgrounds, and other elements – but once stuff starts getting complicated I reach for AE.

[Tom Daigon]

Please keep us posted on the new machines performance with FCS2.

[Mark Maness]

[Allan W.] “Don’t forget to fix your layers’ resolution to the canvas size! That speeds things up quite a bit.”

Can you explain this a little better? I’m fumbling through all of this myself and I already have the system that you just purchased.

I have noticed that if you Motion project is a different resolution than your FCP project, you’re going to have problems. Movement will get very jerky and aliased lines start to appear.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Mark Maness]

[lasvideo] “Please keep us posted on the new machines performance with FCS2.”

As for performance, my quad 3.0 Intel system work pretty good. But I will say that its not near as fluid or smooth as the machines at NAB. I’m pretty sure that Motion was solely intended for the new Octocore systems.

But performance isn’t too shabby on a quad 3 using an ATI X1900 XT with 8 gig of RAM. Now, dealing with output to my Kona 3 card has been an issue. If you aren’t working in square pixel (1920×1080), the screen seems to squeeze down to 720.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey