‘send to motion’ in fxp x

[Walter Soyka]

[Jeremy Garchow] “So while it is certainly a function of Quicktime, the instructions that the component carries out are probably via some sort of language. In that link you sent, it said it gave him a flattened file, which means that the component is running a translation, it isn’t simply saying motion is a codec.”

I think the Motion component was a frame server [link]. When the requesting application (be it FCP7, QuickTime Player, or in that example, AE) asks for the next frame of video from a .MOTN file, the Motion QT component directs the Motion engine to render that frame and then passes it back to the application as if it were any other piece of traditional media.

In other words, from FCP’s or AE’s perspective, it is very much like a codec (decoded by the QuickTime framework). From the component’s perspective, and from the Motion renderer’s perspective, yes, it’s Motion’s internal format, not pre-rendered video.

The brilliance of the old system was abstracting all that away from other apps, so they never had to know that they were using a Motion project; it just felt like a regular piece of media, just like any other .MOV file. By engineering the system well, integration came for free.

[Jeremy Garchow] “And then going FROM FCPX to Motion is different again, as things need to be timed and layered and sorted which seems to indicate some sort of language that’s being used. I don’t know, it’s speculation on my part, but QT components aren’t available in FCPX as there’s no QT API like there used to be.”

I’d buy that.

Here’s some wild, baseless, utterly uninformed speculation of my own: maybe Apple initially developed XMEML for their own internal use for round-tripping with Motion/STP, before it took on a life of its own as general interchange.

All our speculation aside, though, I think Jim’s right to call Apple out for this. It’s not like the ProApps team found out that XMEML and QuickTime integration wouldn’t work last June. Even if it’s only temporary, this workflow gap is a step backward.

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
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[Daniel Rutledge]

I’ll go along with “I don’t understand” but for different reasons. The way that I see it is that if you can publish all the parameters of various effects and behaviors, or add them to rigs, and these can all be controlled in Fcp X, then I don’t understand why the two programs aren’t completely integrated. In the months leading up to the release of Fcp x I had guessed that they would do what they did; strip elements of the suite and add them directly to the Fcp UI. But I assumed that Motion would be at the top of the list. It had failed as a competitor to After Effects, but as FCP user I used it a lot just for convenience. I figured that they would capitalize on that convenience. I guess I was expecting something like Smoke. I still don’t know why the Motion UI can’t open in FCP. Motion projects could be sort of like compound clips or Multicam clips. When you open a Multicam clip in the Angle Editor, it’s like being back in a track based environment. It would be great to do the same with motion. I still hope this is where things are headed down the road.