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OT: Hit Film For Mac
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “(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.”
I guess I owe you breakfast or something now… but really, why not Motion?
It’s real-time. It has a decent feature set. It’s highly focused on motion design. It’s mature: 9 years old now! It integrates with an NLE (see what I did there?) It’s as cheap to buy as a month of CC is to rent. Oh, and it’s from Apple, so it’s accessible to an awful lot of designers.
Motion has been doing what you’re describing for almost a decade. Why hasn’t it caught on? Why won’t you use it?
[Aindreas Gallagher] “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.”
Hmm. I’m not trying to defend Ae as an inevitability. Quite the contrary — I think that more competition in this space would be welcome, and I think that most of the really interesting work isn’t happening exclusively in Ae right now.
I keep tossing kippers on my tab for you because I think that Motion is a cautionary tale. It has everything you want, but you still won’t use it, and you actively want to replace Ae. I don’t think that speed (the high floor) is enough to overcome the frustrating limitations (the low ceiling) of a partial-solution app like Motion.
Personally, I’m trying to learn Houdini in my spare time. It’s mainly used for film VFX now, but I think that its “go procedural” mindset is a natural fit for motion graphics.
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 -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “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 at all disagree that there’s a potential for such a product – there’s always room for competition and Adobe sure do need some at this point. In fact, I’d like to see a raft of Ae competitors springing up – it could only be good for everybody.
But I seriously doubt anyone could develop and market such a competitor for the kind of money you’re talking about – much more like $1000, I would say, which I think was Shawn’s suggestion too.
I think it’s easy to underestimate how much work would need to go into it – it’s not like building an NLE, which is frankly very small beer by comparison.
It’s much more like building a 3D product. In fact, it would be very much like what happened with Modo, an outstanding 3D package that I keep mentioning here but which seems to have no penetration with the contributors to this forum, a fact that seems germane to this discussion.
So outstanding in fact, that there’s a notorious and slightly desperate Autodesk white paper that sets out for its sales team the arguments to use to explain why Maya has the edge over Modo – and this is a few years ago now.
Modo has hit version 801 this week and it’s a very exciting offering indeed with signs that character animation has finally arrived at a pretty fully-fledged state.
I got on board at the end of 301 in 2009 and at that point it was a real leap of faith to believe that it would develop to where it is today.
What Luxology decided to do from the outset is precisely what you’re suggesting should happen here – build it for speed and leanness and modernity with a very clear professional target market; keep up a steady upgrade pattern (essentially annual these days); only introduce features when they were good and ready and absolutely not try and hit all the targets from the outset.
Modo has succeeded, despite competing in a relatively crowded market, by being incredibly focussed, building a great user community, and most of all by creating an exceptionally good product.
But there are still things that it doesn’t have that drive me crazy and send me back to the old dinosaurs occasionally.
Suffice it to say, that my commitment to Modo hasn’t been cheap in the long run, even with a starting price of around $900 (I seem to remember). All the upgrades are paid for and cumulatively that’s a lot of money, even if the initial entry point was lower than everything except Lightwave.
Not sure what the point of this is, except to say that it’s taken a long time – in industry years – to get it to where it’s starting to achieve feature parity with the major players.
Do we think that the Ae community, much more dyed-in-the wool and unwilling to investigate alternative options to the Adobe monopoly offering, would embrace a new product in the same way, and in sufficient numbers, and have the patience to see it build slowly over a number of years?
In 3D there has always been a range of credible offerings and 3D artists are very used to jumping from one product to another – very few stake undying allegiance to one product or another if they have any sense at all.
The exact opposite is true of the Ae community who are more defined by their tool of choice than by what they actually do. That is the problem to overcome, I think. Not insoluble, but a very hard nut to crack.
Why would Ae users leave behind their comfort zone where everything is to hand and everything is made easy, for an offering that initially gave them much, much less? Aside from what Ae actually is in and of itself, think of the scripts and plug-ins and vast support resources …
And yes, Walter is right – you keep asking for Motion you just don’t realise it 😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “In fact, it would be very much like what happened with Modo, an outstanding 3D package that I keep mentioning here but which seems to have no penetration with the contributors to this forum, a fact that seems germane to this discussion.
“Hey, I’ll talk about Modo! I’d love to hear your opinion.
I haven’t looked at seriously, ever, because I’ve heard scary (possibly unfounded?) tales of its stability and (again, without having used it) I am somewhat leery of its Lightwave-ish heritage.
But Brad Peebler is my kind of geek, and 701 looked cool in demos, especially the particle system. Now that I’m becoming a lot more interested in Nuke (due to the upcoming Nuke Studio), maybe Modo makes a more sense than it did before.
That said, I like C4D for its interface, its mograph toolset, and its stunning Ae integration (sorry, Aindreas). I am loving Houdini for its power and sheer nerdiness. Why would I love Modo?
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 -
[Walter Soyka] “Hey, I’ll talk about Modo!”
I hoped you’d rise to the bait.
Brad Peebler is indeed a great guy, but (clever and funny as he is as you can tell from his “modcasts”!) he’d be the first to admit that he’s not the real brains – there are some simply awesome talents behind it despite their Lightwave credentials. (Allen Hastings is astonishingly brilliant).
It was actually the fact that Brad and others at NewTek wanted to rebuild Lightwave from the ground up that led to them leaving when the management disagreed.
That’s what’s particularly interesting in terms of this discussion.
As for stability issues, I’ve done some massively big jobs in Modo without serious problems – I suspect that’s just nasty rumour-mongering. The transition to 64 bit in 501 was the most impressive such transition I’ve seen in any application – already extremely fast in 32 bit, it became massively faster. I’ve not seen that kind of speed bump anywhere before. They really take speed optimisation extremely seriously and always have done.
The renderer is one of the best-looking I’ve seen and the OpenGL preview rendering gives you really great real-time feedback which speeds things up no end.
Your point about interoperability is of course very much being taken care of now that they’re in the Foundry stable, but your insistence on Ae compatibility is sadly just one more nail in the coffin of Aindreas’ noble dream. You Ae people – Ae is the Sun around which everything else must revolve 😉
I haven’t used C4D much, but I would say that Modo feels like a much more serious offering in terms of its long term potential – they’ve built it slowly and deliberately from the ground up with an incredibly deep, powerful and well-thought out architecture that I don’t think C4D quite matches.
” In April 2005, the high-end visual effects studio Digital Domain integrated modo into their production pipeline. Other studios to adopt modo include Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, Zoic Studios, id Software, Eden FX, Studio ArtFX, The Embassy Visual Effects, Naked Sky Entertainment and Spinoff Studios.”
Although it doesn’t get talked about much by the casual 3D user, there’s no question that it’s started to penetrate deep into the upper echelons – and for very good reasons. And of course, it talks nicely with the rest of the 3D world.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “Your point about interoperability is of course very much being taken care of now that they’re in the Foundry stable, but your insistence on Ae compatibility is sadly just one more nail in the coffin of Aindreas’ noble dream. You Ae people – Ae is the Sun around which everything else must revolve ;-)”
You know, I started using Nuke in the first place to replace Ae as the compositor for my C4D renders. I was going out of my mind in Ae trying to manage all the object buffers as layers — clearly a task better suited for nodes — and because multipass EXR was so slow.
But then Adobe went an introduced CINEWARE and improved EXR support. CINEWARE doesn’t solve my node/layers problem, and I was pretty well opposed to it at first as a waste of resources — but the ability to bounce camera/light/null data back and forth between the apps with a single click is really a big workflow improvement over the old one-way 3D-to-comp system.
TLDR; I had one foot out the door for compositing, but then they pulled me back in!
[Simon Ubsdell] “I haven’t used C4D much, but I would say that Modo feels like a much more serious offering in terms of its long term potential – they’ve built it slowly and deliberately from the ground up with an incredibly deep, powerful and well-thought out architecture that I don’t think C4D quite matches.”
Fair. The advantage of new applications is more modern architectures. The advantage of old applications is maturity. These same advantages are also their primary disadvantages!
Is there anything in your mind that Modo does especially well? Unique strengths?
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 -
[Walter Soyka] “Why hasn’t it caught on?”
Because no one has “edited Cold Mountain” with it?
😀
I know that Motion used to crash a lot, so much so it prevented me from being interested in it.
I am not a mograph artist, but I need to perform mograph actions sometimes, and Ae was just more stable to do the very simple things I need to do. And then of course I can use Ae for a ton of other things (composite/roto/paint/key/etc). It is the proverbial Jobsian truck.
The “problem” I have with Ae and me is the UI, and the performance barrier that creates at even the very simplest of levels. The principles of it haven’t really changed all that much over the course of the 15ish years I’ve used it, and the underlying RAM preview and playback methods are still the same! I know some will argue about global cache, yadda yadda, but you know what I mean. As soon as you change something, or enough of something, the cache becomes obsolete. You can’t simply crunch through the change as easily as you can in Motion.
The past week we had client attended edit and motion graphics sessions, I as doing the editing of course. It really is like watching paint dry. These were fairly complex compositions, and this was a highly experienced and seasoned Ae artist. Even he gets confused in the interface sometimes because it isn’t real straightforward where the interaction is happening in a really complex and megalayered comp.
At the same time, I highly doubt he would switch to anything else for what he does in Ae. Also, he loves CC as do most still and motion designers I talk to. 🙂
Jeremy
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[Walter Soyka] “But then Adobe went an introduced CINEWARE and improved EXR support. CINEWARE doesn’t solve my node/layers problem, and I was pretty well opposed to it at first as a waste of resources — but the ability to bounce camera/light/null data back and forth between the apps with a single click is really a big workflow improvement over the old one-way 3D-to-comp system.”
Yes, I’ll certainly buy that CINEWARE has got to be seriously useful for a lot of users. Personally, I feel even more strongly than you do and I abominate the notion of doing 3D compositing without nodes but that ease of use does have its attractions. Up to a certain level of complexity …
[Walter Soyka] “Is there anything in your mind that Modo does especially well? Unique strengths?”
I like it for its dissimilarity to C4D 😉 C4D seems to be engineered to “make things easy” whereas Modo is built to make processes incredibly deep. I’m not sure you can have easy and deep in the same package.
I’ve been checking out the new character animation features in 801 and there’s some seriously well thought out stuff in there:
In fact all of the new features are as always a really significant step forward – without trying to over-reach and under-deliver.
I think you’d really like how “scriptable” it all is.
What’s really great for me is how powerful the modelling toolset is and it keeps getting better – Mesh Fusion is a fantastic way to work for instance, combining the best of subdivision and booleans.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I know that Motion used to crash a lot, so much so it prevented me from being interested in it.”
I used Motion really heavily in the v1/v2 era, and it was super-crashy — but isn’t that better now?
[Jeremy Garchow] “The “problem” I have with Ae and me is the UI, and the performance barrier that creates at even the very simplest of levels.”
One of my favorite hobbies is pestering the Ae team with UI suggestions. I think there is enormous room for improvement there.
I agree on the performance issue, too. Working in Motion or Mamba and then coming back to Ae is pretty shocking. This is why I was so excited to see Steve Forde’s post on performance that I shared above. This is one of those places where the app’s maturity has allowed this enormous third-party plugin ecosystem, but the app’s maturity has saddled it all with an thoroughly unmodern architecture.
[Jeremy Garchow] “At the same time, I highly doubt he would switch to anything else for what he does in Ae.”
FCP7 used to be formidable like this, too. Ae has to keep evolving and it needs to address its legacy architectural issues to stay relevant.
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 -
[Walter Soyka] “Ae has to keep evolving and it needs to address its legacy architectural issues to stay relevant.”
I think it’s easy to underestimate just how much of a challenge this is. They have known for an eternity that their users want performance improvements but they just can’t seem to deliver them. Legacy architecture can easily become a millstone it’s impossible to shake off.
Which is why I’d love to see Aindreas’ built from scratch thing … Ae Modo-style.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “I think it’s easy to underestimate just how much of a challenge this is. They have known for an eternity that their users want performance improvements but they just can’t seem to deliver them. Legacy architecture can easily become a millstone it’s impossible to shake off.”
I underestimate neither the challenge nor the Ae team’s commitment to their users.
[Simon Ubsdell] “Which is why I’d love to see Aindreas’ built from scratch thing … Ae Modo-style.”
I’m watching some Modo videos now. You could have just said, “Walter, go look up ‘tool pipeline’ right this very second!”
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
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