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OT: Hit Film For Mac
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[Walter Soyka] “A lot of the value that Ae adds is the VFXy stuff. You noted LUTs and mask tracking in your original feature list. I’d consider these compositing, closer to VFX than mograph — yet you think they are essential features for mograph. I think that’s because the lines around mograph have become so blurred.”
The expansion of mograph to encompass so many more areas than just mograph in the old-fashioned sense is almost certainly directly driven specifically by what Ae has come to be over the years.
More users started to like using Ae for VFX, so more VFX tools got added, so more mograph began to have a VFX component, and so on. Mograph doesn’t especially need 3D camera tracking – 2D should be enough for most purposes, but now it’s here we’ll see 3D tracking everywhere.
Ae has effectively defined the market that any competitor has to get to grips with. Mograph means what Ae and its devoted users have defined it as meaning.
Which is why Aindreas’ dream application is going to struggle. You can’t appeal to the Ae audience without offering the full range of tools and workflows that Ae has defined as “essential”.
I think the point you make about convergence is right – we see it happening everywhere, and we may well start to see fewer specialist tools and more monster agglomerations, which may well not do the job as well but which seem to be what the market is asking for.
I think that’s a shame – I’m a big believer in dedicated tools that are refined to do a few things well rather than many things indifferently. And I have no problem in hopping between applications to take advantage of their individual strengths. But I suspect I’m in a tiny minority.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
If Adobe got wind of anyone trying to take AE’s crown, I would imagine they would throw the resources at it that it needs to improve it’s speed. They’ve got too much of a head start for anyone to catch up.
Steve Connor
Mellowing slowly -
[Simon Ubsdell] “I actually think they’ve made a decision to compete in the middle of the market, where the big bucks are potentially going to come from, rather than go for the top-end Ae market. I notice lots of shiny stuff in there that’s designed to sell mass market units. The only thing I looked at particularly closely was the keying which is serviceable but very definitely not top flight and that I think is quite a useful benchmarks for the product as a whole.”
Yes, that makes sense. I admire the work they’ve done so far and I hope they can stay in the game long enough to elevate the software.
[Simon Ubsdell] “Actually you and Walter are responsible for having got me started on the tutorials following our Motion/Ae discussions last summer.”
Ha ha, well… if my being a PITA encourages anyone in any small way to do work that good, I shall endeavor to be more annoying more often. 😉
[Simon Ubsdell] “One of the reasons I haven’t done much in the way of compositing tutorials is not having materials to use other than client material, and not having a funny, fat friend on hand who’s prepared to run around being blown up on camera. Anyone who’s followed Andrew Kramer will know who I’m talking about ;-)”
lol – I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’ve never really watched VCP or Film Riot for the tutorials… I just think those folks are really entertaining. Well that, and to see what products VCP is coming up with next. Let me know if you need any plates for your tutorials, I would be willing to run out and shoot something for you. 🙂
[Simon Ubsdell] “The other reasons are more to do with the limitations of Motion – the lack of true 3D, but also the poor quality of the 2D motion tracking, and so on. (I haven’t looked deeply into mObject but that does seem to be starting to offer the kind of 3D object importing that you get with Element 3D.) That makes it hard to do the kind of flashy stuff that most people want to see. But I’ll certainly give it some thought.”
Yes, please do! Who knows who you might inspire in the process. Again, let me know if I can help in any way. 🙂
Shawn
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[Simon Ubsdell] “Actually you and Walter are responsible for having got me started on the tutorials following our Motion/Ae discussions last summer.”
[Simon Ubsdell] “The other reasons are more to do with the limitations of Motion – the lack of true 3D, but also the poor quality of the 2D motion tracking, and so on. (I haven’t looked deeply into mObject but that does seem to be starting to offer the kind of 3D object importing that you get with Element 3D.) That makes it hard to do the kind of flashy stuff that most people want to see. But I’ll certainly give it some thought.””
[Shawn Miller] “Yes, please do! Who knows who you might inspire in the process. Again, let me know if I can help in any way. :-)”
My plan is to goad Simon into doing this by occasionally stating that Motion is pretty cool, but that I still prefer to do most of my work in Ae. Observe!
True story: just a couple months ago, I prototyped an M5/FCPX title rig in Ae. I delivered in Motion, but I ultimately used a pre-rendered Ae asset in there somewhere…
(Simon, that’s your cue.)
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Shawn Miller] “Let me know if you need any plates for your tutorials, I would be willing to run out and shoot something for you. 🙂 “
I can see where this is leading. You and/or Walter are going to set me a Motion compositing/VFX challenge complete with source material …
… that I’m going to fail horribly and then all discussion will be at an end 🙁
Seriously, thanks for your encouragement – and Walter’s too, of course.
It’s been an interesting adventure that I certainly wouldn’t have embarked upon if it weren’t for you two.
What it’s shown me is both how far you can push Motion if you try hard enough, but also how impenetrable the barriers are when you run into them.
Come on, Apple – perhaps you could put just a little effort in this for my sake?
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] ”
I can see where this is leading. You and/or Walter are going to set me a Motion compositing/VFX challenge complete with source material …… that I’m going to fail horribly and then all discussion will be at an end :(“
lol – You’ve exposed me! No, my motives are pure, just seeing if I can lend a hand to your effort. I’m also curious to see how you might go about accomplishing certain tasks in Motion… matching plates, stacking render passes, generally sexing up a shot and whatnot. Hopefully, that will spark even more conversation!
[Simon Ubsdell] “Come on, Apple – perhaps you could put just a little effort in this for my sake?”
Ha ha – for all of our sakes! I don’t think it’s good for the industry to have such few software choices.
Shawn
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[Simon Ubsdell] “Which is why Aindreas’ dream application is going to struggle. You can’t appeal to the Ae audience without offering the full range of tools and workflows that Ae has defined as “essential”.”
I’m not entirely sure still, although I’ve done a truck of stuff with the 3D camera tracker to be fair.
I simply think (revising again) there is an addressable market for a mograph tool that isn’t flash, which is dead, and isn’t AE, which is, being fair, incredibly bloated. I’ll go on record saying I don’t see it as being bloated given I got my employer to pay for natresse grain surgery before adobe absorbed it – I’ve never been more than a b-level player with AE, but I feel intrinsically comfortable with it because I saw everything come in over the last fifteen years. the only thing my brain shut down completely on was typing out expressions. I’m not doing that. I’m not making a section of my brain for that grammar. not happening.
AE is over weighted for the task of mograph – and there were a ton of people doing extremely interesting mograph out of flash that largely informed the aesthetics bleeding into general AE work the last half decade.
there definitely is space for a focused mograph thought leader application dedicated to brand mograph video execution as long as it operates transformatively at near realtime for them, with a suite of truly excellent design tools and has a sticker price between say 350- 550 as shawn posits.
I don’t think there is any sense to this mindless defence of AE as an inevitability given a lot of the fresher work was being done with flash when it was the live design environment under a competitor. This defence of AE now, taken in that context, feels like extremely lazy thinking to me.
I don’t care about c4D, and for the purposes of this response I don’t care about LUTS. (ha ha! malleable position) I think there is an argument and a commercial viability for a tool that can demonstrably answer mograph cleaner and faster than AE.
(also If anyone says motion once more – they owe me a kipper) …Motion is the spotty exchange student that everyone in brand new design mograph disliked before they ever met it. motion is as consequential as betamax.
we’re talking about a well constructed, funded, blade sharp mograph effort that challenges AE right at its brand asset execution core.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Shawn Miller] “. A modern, dedicated mograph tool with a scripting engine, plugin architecture, near RT performance in the $349-$599 price range could potentially sell like hotcakes. Though to be honest, the application you described earlier in the thread should really cost more like $1,000 – $2,000… you would have to pare down the features to get the cost down to $350.00, I think. “
yeah, I’m revising the argument as I go.. it’s just somewhere in my bones i feel, if it was built right, by like, the super right people, gunning for a serious market segment, there actually is an idealised VA mograph application that the brand new design crowd would gravitate towards to execute their core concepts. simply because they could feel it had been made specifically for their use cases. Very well made, nimble, basically real-time and deployable to multiple screen use cases. It’s the last part where you feel AE fails spectacularly.
I made the argument below with simon, but you could argue that a lot of the important mograph design work of the last 6-8 years (weighted to the back end), occurred in flash, and informed a ton of what is going on now? AE really did not lead the flat dynamic design aesthetic.
you’d think a lot of the current mograph aesthetic – and the broader procedural dynamics – are an AE latecomer outcropping of that environment and the practitioners who gravitated to it? because they had a clean room operating environment?
granted we’re bullsh*tting a fantasy application, but you’d feel a design clipper has a reason for being in opposition the QE2 that is AE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WO9XRVfM7A
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “yeah, I’m revising the argument as I go.. it’s just somewhere in my bones i feel, if it was built right, by like, the super right people, gunning for a serious market segment, there actually is an idealised VA mograph application that the brand new design crowd would gravitate towards to execute their core concepts. simply because they could feel it had been made specifically for their use cases. Very well made, nimble, basically real-time and deployable to multiple screen use cases. It’s the last part where you feel AE fails spectacularly.”
Yup, I can certainly see where you’re coming from, and I don’t disagree at all. If I could get a stable application like this at a reasonable price, I would be all over it. Of course, it would also have to be cross platform, and be able to send standard file formats and XML to and from other applications.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “I made the argument below with simon, but you could argue that a lot of the important mograph design work of the last 6-8 years (weighted to the back end), occurred in flash, and informed a ton of what is going on now? AE really did not lead the flat dynamic design aesthetic.
you’d think a lot of the current mograph aesthetic – and the broader procedural dynamics – are an AE latecomer outcropping of that environment and the practitioners who gravitated to it? because they had a clean room operating environment?”
Absolutely! I would even say that the work of Flash animators started influencing the rest of the mograph community as far back as 2000.
Speaking of, I was asked to add subtitles to this video a few weeks ago. I don’t think it would look anything like this without the influences you’re talking about. I think the ‘Flash aesthetic’ is here to stay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jkbG1RgvUY
[Aindreas Gallagher] “granted we’re bullsh*tting a fantasy application, but you’d feel a design clipper has a reason for being in opposition the QE2 that is AE.”
For sure, I think there is definitely room for a fresh perspective on motion graphics software. Now I wonder if someone is working on something like this as we speak… stranger things have happened. 🙂
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “Now I wonder if “
wondering has financial attributes hard to beat.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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