Motion versus After Effects

[Mylenium]

[lackner90] “I was just wondering how do you guys feel about Motion versus AE?
Is it equivalent to AE? It’s just minus the rendering time that makes it so cool?”

Definitely not and your employers are morons to think so. Without complementary apps such as FCP, Shake or AE, Motion is nothing more than an extremely fast title and particle generator (something, which you can get in other apps like particle Illusion just as well). I’ve only played with Motion on and off on machines of other users (since I myself ma not a Mac guy)and on demo days, but it’s more frustration than fun. The entire keyframing system is completely ridiculous. I can already see your boss complaining about your slowness when he requests you to implement his wishes for changing something. Like you said yourself, to me Motion is nothing more than a tool to get some ideas and build some rough templates, but I never would entrust a serious moneymaking project to it.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Tony Kloiber]

Well it’s realtime only to the point your computer (GPU) can handle what your asking of it. If you take the time to learn the program you will see that somethings go quite well. The integration with Final Cut can work well, it depends on how you want to work and what your trying to do.

I believe people thought little of the preset “behaviors” that AE came out with (v6 or was it v6.5) but found ways to use them.

At first Motion didn’t seem to give me that control I was looking for and of course the way you do something in AE is different in Motion.

If you have both use both. Now if you want to compare things you should of got them to buy Shake.

TonyTony

[Jaime Lackner]

It’s funny that you said that.
Because they do have shake here.
They dont use it though.
They work primarily in Final Cut

[Tony Kloiber]

I know being under pressure to finish a piece you want to use the tool your most comfortable with but when you have the time learn both Motion and Shake and you’ll be be better at AE because of it.

If you have a valid reason to do something in AE or any program just explain it to the people you work with. If they don’t listen it might be that they don’t know or worse don’t care.

Keep Comp’ing

TonyTony

[David Bogie]

Once you get into Motion, you realize what fabulous things it can do for you. That takes a few weeks of frustration. Get the Motion books from APTS.

Once you get familiar with Motion, you will realize what fabulous things you can do in After Effects

You can make stuff to feed back into Motion. Or go the other way with interesting stuff from Motion to AE.

As was said earlier, your boss fell for the marketing BS from Apple. It will be up to you to convince him/her/them you’re smart enough to know what tool is appropriate for a particular job. You need them both. You will use them both on everything you do.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Tyler Paul]

When I started promo’s for the station here ND all they had was Motion as well. I did some pretty cool things with it that got a me some fantastic recognition from the head manager but I can’t tell you how relieved I was to get AE7 here. Motion was great for doing complicated stuff quickly but as soon as you really wanted to push it to the limits it was nothing but troubles. I find the ‘user friendly automation’ programmed into the system screwed me over far more than it helped. I came across many strange things that it was doing with no understanding of why it was doing it.

[Dee Munsch]

I’ve found that Motion is the perfect compliment to AE. It can create some great textures and also inspire you. However, I usually create some texture or background, then bring it right back into AE. Motion IS much faster and that is a threat to AE. I have seen a demo where they hooked up a camera and greenscreen, ran it live through Motion with a key filter. They were able to adjust the lighting, etc and set up a perfect key. I LOVE After Effects and will never leave it, but Adobe needs to be careful b/c some people (including your bosses) will start going to Motion for the speed, not knowing or caring about the “art” of After Effects.

[Nik Manning]

It would be more of a fair fight to compare motion with ae basic version. https://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/matrix.html. Motion $300 AE basic $700. If you need advanced features then ae pro is the winner, but be warned that around 70% of what most motion graphics artists do in ae can be done in motion and faster. Motion is faster, but AE has more features that may come in handy down the road as you perfect your craft. So basically do you use the pro features in AE? If not get a book on motion and you will be impressed.

Young, Dumb, and full of
Potential!

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

” but be warned that around 70% of what most motion graphics artists do in ae can be done in motion and faster”

I don’t know where you take the 70 per cent figure from. Nowadays I can hardly see many broadcast graphics pieces without some form of 3D space and Motion doesn’t have any. It boggles my mind how they can think they can in 2007 offer a motion graphics tool with no 3D space (maybe it’s the famous reality distortion field?). Also, Motion doesn’t have expressions (which AE standard has) nor any other form of parameter linking. I use both and like both, but feel very constrained by the omissions in Motion. It does looks spectacular on paper, but It seems as if most the work on it goes to making it spectacular (think public demos) than being deep and versatile for professional users. The whole text tracking/kerning model is wrong and bug-riden, for example. After using Motion for a couple years, I now have the impression Motion is more for people with some motion graphics needs (news/corporate/event video editors, for example) than for pro motion designers. And that it’s not a bad thing at all.

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

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Having said all that, and to make this post more productive, here are some things in Motion that I would like AE to get.

* Motion Sketch-like functionality for all parameters, not just position.
* Separate XY curves (no separate Z for obvious reasons). Unfortunately, in Motion separate XY is the only way, not an option: I wouldn’t like that for AE.
* While the text animation model in Motion is less powerful than AE’s, the style pane makes it very easy to set and animate glows, drop shadows, gradients, etc. as text attributes. In AE, having those attributes for text animator groups would be really useful. I also like very much the ability to define and save gradient and style presets.
* The object selection system for filters and properties in Motion is amazing. In AE, layer selection menus for filters only allow you to select one item (think Particle Plaground’s layer maps, or Displacement Map, etc). In Motion, you can drag as many objects as you like to an object well. That would be really cool for AE. If not possible, selection of multiple layers in a layer selector menu would be good too.
* The ability to quickly group layers and create visual parent-child relationships is also very cool.

Now, the list of things Motion could get from AE would require a whole afternoon of typing 🙂

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