[Chris Davis]

I’m hearing elsewhere that my computer would work with Motion, if a bit slowly. I’m not doing this professionally. Am I really SOL with 128 MB of VRAM with Motion, or will it just limit RT in some effects?

[Chris Davis]

Tod: Thanks for your reply, even if it is a little biased ;).

[Chad Perkins]
“…They always tell me that Motion is “fun to play around in”, but if you’re going for a specific effect, it’s near impossible to achieve…”

[Brian Charles]
“…What frustrates me about Motion is its obvious power and crappy UI. Its very difficult to achieve complex results using behaviors, keyframe controls and the HUD…”

[Jeremy Allen]
“…Motion is good for quickly generating backgrounds and other cool “one-click” effects, where After Effects is gonna offer more control over effects, and more specialty effects like better color correction, masking and tracking…”

Hugh. Thanks for the info. Sounds sort of like you guys are saying that what makes motion easy for imprecise effects is that same thing that many makes it really difficult to achieve precision.

Jeremy, a lot of the Motion tutorials show quickly putting together the kind of computer generated stuff that you see in TV sports and news shows. Often, when doing effects with actual footage, the tutorials end up making things that look more like designs. Would if be fair to say that Motion is more for this kind of thing and AE is more for manipulating actual footage, in a way that sort of “bends reality,” rather than totally breaking from it?

[Brian Charles]
“…Expect to find a strong After Effects bias on this list.…There are many worthwhile tutorials at VideoCopilot, AETUTS and here that will get you started… Color shifts are common, but you can color manage the workflow — look for the extensive thread on color management in this forum…”

Thanks for the heads up on the color shifts. The tutorials here are really cool but relatively advanced. I was going to go lynda.com for the first 15 hrs. of tutorials, unless you have a better suggestion.

I was noticing a slight bias here – wonder what response I would have gotten had I posted in the Motion section.

BTW, I’m up for any further opinions.

-Chris

[Chris Davis]

Winston and Dan,
Many thanks for the info — you saved me some time and frustration. Looks like I’ll be waiting on Motion until I get a real computer.
-Chris

[Chris Davis]

Dan,

I do not know the direct answer to you question, as I am just considering learning Motion myself. But I noticed no one had responded to your thread yet, so I thought I’d say what I do know. I looked around for info comparing the early 2008 MBP graphics cards with the late 2008 MBP graphics cards when these came out. The gamers seemed to know these cards pretty well. If I remember correctly, the late 2008 MBP cards were less than 20% faster than the early 2008 MBP cards (comparing cards with equal VRAM). I remember thinking that Apple had hyped these cards pretty well. Perhaps this helps.

-Chris

[Chris Davis]

[bogiesan]
“..Forget it.
That’s not a function available in After Effects…”

I appreciate your help here.

[Kevin Camp]
“you will rarely ever get realtime in ae, it’s not designed to operate in realtime, it’s not even trying to be that type of application…

the genral order of importance for ae in rendering is…”

Thanks for the thorough response. That puts it in perspective and helps me understand where my money is best spent for AE.

“if you’re after realtime, go with motion and get a good graphics card…if you want two montiors, get two graphics cards. two montors plugged into the same card split the vram, so if you want motion to have all available vram to work with you will want two cards…”

Hugh. Good to know. I would have thought that the two monitors would just divide the vram and the GPU so that the power and memory went to the monitor that needed it most (the one with the canvas?). Are you implying that the power and memory gets split 50/50, or just that it’s shared between the two monitors?

When using Motion, If I use a single monitor plus a Matrox MXO plus external monitor (ACD) from the DVI out, would you recommend using two graphics cards?

When using Motion, if I use an MXO 2, or Blackmagic Designs Intensity Pro card to feed an HDTV, would this slow down RT? (Two very different price points, I know, but I’m still looking at my options).

Thanks for your help here,
-Chris

[Chris Davis]

Yeah, I had seen your review here of the Kona 3. It’s a mother…

So the Mojo DX box does for Avid MC about what the Decklink does for FCP, and that’s it? Sounds like the MXO 2 with FCP is much better than the Mojo DX for Avid. Interesting marketing on Avid’s part.

-Chris

[Chris Davis]

Got a side question, mainly just curious. On other forums, Avid folks tend to agree that the Mojo DX is way overpriced in comparison to FCP or Premiere-compatible hardware. I’m wondering, what is the FCP “equivalent” of the Mojo DX. Of course all hardware is different, so nothing will be exactly equivalent, but…

Would the Matrox MXO 2, for example, do for FCP most of what the Mojo DX does for Avid MC?

-Chris

[Chris Davis]

[bogiesan]
The state of the art on the Macintosh appears to be the nvidia 3870 (or is it 3780?) and this will offer improved performance in applications such as Apple’s Motion But if you’re an Adobe-only editor, your best bet is to study the AE specifications pages at Adobe’s marketing site…

Thanks for your response. Are you referring to the ATI 3870? Looks like that card is under $200. The Adobe site says that AE will use the Nvidia Quadro 5600 series, so it looks like the sky is the limit as to how much I could spend on a graphics card.

I’m open to any suggestions.

Don’t buy a card exclusively for AE. OpenGL is a cruel joke on the Mac…

The site does say, “On Mac OS X 10.5.3 or higher, some OpenGL accelerated effects may not render on selected cards. Until a solution is available, turn off OpenGL or disable the Accelerate Effects Using OpenGL option in the Previews Preferences.” So if Open GL won’t work with AE and a Mac, does AE still make much use of the graphics card (i.e. how much difference does the graphics card make with RT in AE?). I still want to use AE with Mac, and I want as much RT as possible.

-Chris

[Chris Davis]

[Shane Ross]Apple makes money by having FCP work on Apple products only…so you have to buy a Mac, and a good one, for it to work. Avid only makes the software and the capture cards…so to make money they make their capture hardware the only hardware that works.

Makes sense. Avid sells their overpriced capture/display hardware, and Apple sells overpriced Mac Pro’s (don’t mean to start a “discussion” here about the Mac Pro, but looking at the lower price of the new Intel chips and the higher price of the 2009 Mac Pro, that’s the only view point I can arrive at).

One followup question: do I need some kind of Avid hardware just to turn, say HDV or AVCHD into DXnHD? If so, would the Mojo SDI do it, or would I need a Mojo DX? (FCP allows such conversions using software only).

Also, just a little curious if the MXO2 or AJA Kona 3 basically does everything that the Mojo DX does, even if only for FCP

Thanks,
Chris

[Chris Davis]

[Dino Sanacory]
…there have been anecdotal reports of using an MXO off of the monitor out to feed a real video monitor or using the ability of say a Decklink board to act as a desktop extension. These are both essentially tricks and not supported by Avid. I cant speak to the color accuracy of the outputs in these situations. I will soon be in a position to test both of these propositions and will certainly post my results here…

Thanks. If you think about it when the time comes, you could also put a post on this thread just saying that you posted a new thread about this. That way my e-mail would notify me to take a look… Also I’m not familiar with Decklink.

[Shane Ross]
…There are no third party FULL RESOLUTION options. I say that because the MXO will work with Avid in getting an image onto a broadcast monitor, but it will be acting as a computer monitor…

For FCP, the MXO to ACD would be fine for my purposes (my limited understanding is that this combo allows 1920×1080 footage to be monitored at full resolution with fairly accurate color, at least in FCP). Is there something about Avid that specifically tries to make this NOT work for relatively color accurate full resolution HD monitoring, as it would in FCP?

Thanks,
Chris