What do you want from Motion?

[Marcus Moore]

Yeah, I knew I’d mixed up my companies after I hid “Post”.

But my question still stands. We’ve heard relatively little about FXPlug3 support in Motion and FCPX except that it should enable custom interfaces. Hopefully NAB will bring some announcements about what this might mean more specifically for new 3rd party tools.

[David Eaks]

Andy Neil- “I try not to consider AE and Motion to be in competition”

What I want from Motion is for it to be generally considered as a direct competitor to AE.

But that’s not very specific. Mostly I just want 3D, objects/text, extrusion, a “round” particle etc. NOT meaning stereoscopic 3D, which I couldn’t be less interested in.

[Mitch Ives]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Fix the edges in the keyer.

The edge of the frame should not be part of the light wrap (edge crop), and the edges of the resulting matte after the key need to be more natural and less processed, especially on more difficult keys with subjects that have hair. Some of us have to key more than bald men.”

Amen… and while you’re at it, make sure it’s fixed in FCPX

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Mitch Ives] “Amen… and while you’re at it, make sure it’s fixed in FCPX”

I was kind of hoping for a twofer since the Motion and FCPX keeps seem to be inextricably linked!

😉

Jeremy

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Fix the edges in the keyer.

The edge of the frame should not be part of the light wrap (edge crop), and the edges of the resulting matte after the key need to be more natural and less processed, especially on more difficult keys with subjects that have hair. Some of us have to key more than bald men.”

Indeed. But on top of all that, they really should look at two further areas:

Firstly, the matte tools are not suitable given the harsh automatic key that’s extracted.

If you try to pull some edge detail back using the only possible control that might get you there, namely the “Bias” (actually just a gamma control with a fancy name), you won’t get much detail back but worse you will make the matte’s solid black backing uniformly non-transparent. Not a result you could live with. No idea what’s going on there to produce this but it means the matte tools are functionally next to useless.

EDIT: You’d have thought you could pull this non-transparency back into line by using the Black Level control, but no matter how hard you push it, the result stays the same.

Secondly, they really need to rethink the spill suppression. The method they are using looks pretty crude – the results don’t look good and again the tools they supply to “finesse” the result are simply bizarre and mostly just inappropriate. Tint?? Contrast?? Very strange. (Actually I suspect Tint just over-drives the spill suppression, since it’s not a tint in the sense of a color that the user can influence.)

Lots more control needed over the spill suppression to enable a halfway decent result. Spill suppression is a totally critical component of a decent keyer – even if you can pull a great key, if you can get the spill suppression right you’ll never get a workable result.

More work to do all round, for sure.

I just hope they don’t fix it too quickly and too well … 😉

FURTHER EDIT: With a lot of work I was able to get a result that wasn’t too bad, but the issue of the non-black backing is insurmountable and really a deal-breaker. If you are extremely careful and know what you are doing you can get an OK result with the spill suppression, but there is no meaningful latitude.

And that’s the major issue throughout – you just can’t control the plug-in to get the results you want because it’s all fixed into one rigid method, which is not nearly subtle enough to start with.

If there’s one thing you need in a keyer above all, it’s the ability to finesse every aspect, for the simple reason that no two green(blue) screens present the exact same challenge. But in Apple’s world it’s one size fits all – which is the fundamental issue.

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[James Sullivan]

Send to AE! or a flavor of XML that adobe can deal with. Clip exporter is no longer updated and I have had weird gaps in simple sequences. Apparently the way that FCPx counts time creates rounding errors in other packages. I want my NLE to be just that. Just editing and editing well.

Fight,

James

[Keith Koby]

Thanks Ronny and Andy! Very helpful information re: loop point. Now if we could only include audio…

[Shawn Miller]

EDIT: Sorry, I meant to say that I was curious how you all are handling composting with material originating from 3D applications and cameras that shoot in log… I’m looking at you, Simon. 🙂

How do you folks work in linear and log… is it via plugins, LUTs, or is the capability built in?

Thanks,

Shawn

[Tangier Clarke]

Something like the pin tool in AE
Ability to bend objects (so I don’t have to convert my logo into a font just to wrap it around something)
Something like mObject 3D capability

Make it a direct competitor to AE already rather than an compliment to it.

Tangier