Send To Motion?

[Charlie Austin]

[Herb Sevush] “But we’re not talking about 3rd party apps, we’re talking about the guys on the same team, linking software that is already compatible enough so that you can create EFX’s in one to play in the other. I’m sure there is a good technical reason why this has been so difficult to do, but to a luddite like me it “seems” absurd.”

I really do think it was the same problem. X can open Motion FX because it has the Motion “engine” built in. Until now though, I don’t thing the apps could “talk” to each other. I think now they can. I hope I’m right. 🙂

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Tony West]

[Herb Sevush] ” I think it’s the fact that Motion isn’t as widely accepted, although I use it all the time, that allows this to be such a non-issue.”

I second this.

I love Motion but I feel like I’m on an island.

[Herb Sevush]

[tony west] “I love Motion but I feel like I’m on an island.”

Years ago a very wise editor named Ron Shook made the distinction between an editor’s compositor and gfx artist compositors, with Boris FX being an example of the former and AE the latter. The difference being that editors don’t spend their whole time compositing and need something that can deliver 80% of the features with 20% of the learning curve. I’ve always found that to be a handy distinction. I’ve found Motion to be the very best editor’s compositor I’ve ever used.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Bret Williams]

I’ve always found the interface of Motion to be as bizarre and unintuitive as the switch to X was compared to compositing apps like AE. At it’s heart, I’ve always felt that AE is the such a simple app. It’s just photoshop layers, but with an additional dimension of time. You can twirl down each layer and there are all the filters and to the right of each their keyframes.

In motion, the key framing is separated and appears in different places, or you have to go to an inspector window to adjust things, and they have a whole panel called layers, which seems to be the timeline just without the time. I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s still a bizarre app to me. I know it would be second nature if I used it all the time. But I think I took one quick tutorial for AE many many years ago and immediately after they showed, here’s the project pane, drag to the timeline, & twirl down and add keyframes, that was all I needed to get going. Extremely basic and simple at it’s core.

[Andy Neil]

[Bret Williams] “In motion, the key framing is separated and appears in different places, or you have to go to an inspector window to adjust things, and they have a whole panel called layers, which seems to be the timeline just without the time”

It’s been so long since I learned Motion that I’m divorced from the difficulties I had, but I lay most of those difficulties at the feet of AE. After Effects demanded a certain workflow that wasn’t easy necessarily, but you get used to it and it seemed natural (at least for simple projects). Motions layout and workflow were significantly different and when I tried to do things in Motion, all I could think about was how to adapt my AE workflow to get the same result in Motion. Eventually, I’d get frustrated and do the project in AE to meet my deadline.

It wasn’t until I stopped using AE, cold turkey that I started using Motion the way I should’ve been using it from the start. It became much more intuitive when I stopped trying to use it like AE. Most times I don’t even bother to open the timeline view when working in Motion.

Downside is that I’m mediocre with AE these days. I only just recently got CC so now I have a chance to rebuild my AE muscles.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Bret Williams]

The workflow in AE seems exactly the same to me as an NLE workflow. Assets bin, drag to timeline, keyframe. Yes it gets more complicated with pre comps- but that’s just the same as nests or compound clips. That’s one gotcha with Motion. One timeline per project. I like that in AE I can have one project with a unified render que that keeps up with all my outputs. Lower 3rds, opens, titles, etc. And in the project window I can have folders with compositions ready for output. Just like a folder of sequence versions in FCP legacy or any other NLE for that matter. In Motion you pretty much have to do all that versioning and organization at the finder level.

But AE is getting very long in the tooth. The app is great. But it has two issues right now. First -by their own admission, the external monitoring is broken and likely to make your system crash. It’s based on a closed source quicktime feature that Apple downs’t support anymore. They have a disclaimer right there in the prefs panel discouraging you from turning it on. Second, the lack of mercury transmit in the app for playback. Previewing is much better than it used to be, but with all the demands of cameras, lights, extrusions, raytracing, etc. it’s just not there. Pressing play in Motion is a joy. It just plays back, stuttery usually, but pretty well to get a sense of what you’re doing. And render speed in Motion is light years ahead. If you place an AE project in Premiere, it’ll play back like a project in Motion does. Generally pretty darn well. But AE itself can’t playback for squat.

[Erik Lindahl]

It might just be me but my experience with Motion is it’s a nice tech-demo. But as a soon as you do something serious in it the app bogs to a halt in an instant. AE lacks the realtime but never hits this wall of pain.

Also, rendering AE-comps via Premier Pro is utter crap from my experience. You end up using one thread for rendering which can make these X-times slower.

The whole “send to” is a novel feature but at the end of the day, for me, it simply adds confusion and complexity. It’s fine when for example sending a sequence to grading but of if you have X shots needing FX the send to command mostly makes things more messy than manually handling it.

I fully agree the option of sending elements and sequence to and from Motion is good – especially for certain projectes. But in Premier – where it’s a feature many prase – I just don’t get it. I end up rendering out elements from AE instead of the editor. More confusion.

AE is getting a new video monitor solution this spring. It was aimed for the December release but for some reason it didn’t make the cut. There is a note about it in another thread.

[Steve Connor]

[Bret Williams] “I’ve always found the interface of Motion to be as bizarre and unintuitive as the switch to X was compared to compositing apps like AE. At it’s heart, I’ve always felt that AE is the such a simple app. It’s just photoshop layers, but with an additional dimension of time. You can twirl down each layer and there are all the filters and to the right of each their keyframes.
“

I’ve always felt the opposite! I picked up Motion much quicker than AE

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Walter Soyka]

[Charlie Austin] “There’s a new API in X designed for “sharing” things between X and other apps. I would not be at all surprised to see something like what you guys want appear. 10.1 is a huge foundational overhaul to the app. Now they can start to build on this foundation. Should be interesting. ;-)”

Do we know much publicly about this new API? I had assumed it was for sharing rendered video to other sources (like you could share directly to your own MAM system), but I’m just catching up on the news now — is there evidence that it offers more?

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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