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With Great Sadness……
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[Michael Belanger] “I have been using AE for eons …very close to the beginning … “
I don’t think Motion and AE are a fair comparison. Motion is designed as a motion graphics application that’s easy for editors to do fancy things without getting bogged down with keyframes. As such it’s both powerful and crippled (yes I know keyframes are there under the hood). AE simply blows away Motion when it comes to doing some serious compositing, especially when you count the included add-ons, like Mocha. Just take a look at a feature like Rotobrush. That’s some serious image science without anything comparable in Motion. The same would be true of Nuke or even the built-in tools of Smoke or Avid DS.
For $50, Motion is a great buy, but it quickly falls short when you need to do something beyond building templates or flying text around on the screen. But, it does some nice things. For example I just used it yesterday to change speed on footage that was then composited in AE. Of course, it crashed when I tried to use Optical Flow, so I stayed with Motion Blur-Blending. I would have used Twixtor in AE, but it wasn’t available on the workstation I was using.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Sorry… use what you like but you are spot on that Motion is kinda vanilla. I honestly don’t think AE is any more difficult than motion. There are plug ins for AE that simply don’t exist for Motion like invigorator so I stick with what I know works. I had a client fumble for hours trying to do a simple camera zoom in to a very small spot . Did it in about a minute in AE. You may be correct that Motion is more for beginners.
mb
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AE users always talk down Motions capabilities, glad you’re having fun with it, I’ve been doing the same this week
Steve Connor
“FCPX Agitator”
Adrenalin Television -
[Oliver Peters] “For $50, Motion is a great buy, but it quickly falls short when you need to do something beyond building templates or flying text around on the screen. But, it does some nice things. For example I just used it yesterday to change speed on footage that was then composited in AE. Of course, it crashed when I tried to use Optical Flow, so I stayed with Motion Blur-Blending. I would have used Twixtor in AE, but it wasn’t available on the workstation I was using.”
Agreed. I love Motion for its ability to wap together a title sequence, and you can do some very creative things with it very quickly. But to even suggest that it is where AE is silly. I still like using it with FCS3, though.
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Yeah sorry don;t have the latest version of Motion as I don’t use FCX … I took out the P on purpose
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I wasn’t trying to Motion on the same level as AE. Nobody who has used both would. But for an Apple originated program, it is incredibly useful, especially in FCS 3. I have not used 5 enough to make a judgement. Other programs that I think work well are the iwork suite, and Garage Band.
don walker
texarkana, texasJohn 3:16
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I think we went down this Motion rabbit hole because of Michael’s statement that “APPLE is a marketing company who have no ability to write code.” I think that’s completely incorrect. Apple is a DESIGN company in the same way that Porsche is a design company, which also manufactures cars. (No, no… Don’t let this turn into another dumb car analogy!!! 😉 )
The point is the design is important for both hardware and software and it’s in the DNA of everything Apple does. They also happen to be very good at marketing, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do good design, coding or anything else.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “I think we went down this Motion rabbit hole because of Michael’s statement that “APPLE is a marketing company who have no ability to write code.” I think that’s completely incorrect. Apple is a DESIGN company in the same way that Porsche is a design company, which also manufactures cars. (No, no… Don’t let this turn into another dumb car analogy!!! 😉 )”
Great comparison. I think this is spot on.
[Oliver Peters] “The point is the design is important for both hardware and software and it’s in the DNA of everything Apple does. They also happen to be very good at marketing, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do good design, coding or anything else.”
I was initially going to write a harsh critique of Michael’s original post, because I do believe that Apple has some truly outstanding engineering — but then I realized I couldn’t. I couldn’t come up with a single counterexample in the professional space that showed something that Apple both designed and built entirely in-house that was renowned for feature set or broad applicability, stability and performance.
The big ones are FCPX, Motion, and the application formerly known as Soundtrack. Everything else in FCS came from elsewhere. Logic came from eMagic. Mac OS X is brilliant, but it’s based on FreeBSD, Darwin, the Mach kernel, and NeXTSTEP. iOS is brilliant, but it’s based on Mac OS X. (I’d argue that what Apple has added to Darwin/Mach/NeXTSTEP to get to OS X/iOS shows massive ability in both design and engineering, but Michael is still right to point out that the provenance is not uniquely Apple.)
FCPX and Motion are great examples of design — they are both applications that offer completely new and inventive solutions to long-standing problems — but neither is known for stability, so it’s hard to argue that they are great examples of well-written software. Soundtrack was less inventive in its design, and also was not a great exemplar of software engineering.
As best I can figure off the top of my head, that leaves Compressor as the best thing I can point to, and that’s not a lot to hang your hat on.
I was more than a bit surprised when I thought this through, but might there be more to Michael’s argument than appears at first blush? Is there something else I’m not thinking of?
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 -
[Simon Ubsdell] “I’d say on the latest evidence that Aindreas is turning out to have been the one calm voice of reason all along!!!!”
The “one”???
Come now Simon, he’s but one of many (okay of several). 🙂
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com
http://www.ProMax.com
Sales | Integration | SupportDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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[Don Walker] “I wasn’t trying to Motion on the same level as AE. Nobody who has used both would. But for an Apple originated program, it is incredibly useful, especially in FCS 3. I have not used 5 enough to make a judgement. Other programs that I think work well are the iwork suite, and Garage Band.
“Don, I agree with you completely. Its a very handy program. I always been impressed with its behaviors concept, and I use it frequently. Its been a very nice Swiss Army Knife for the FCS suite.
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