Gabriele De simone
Forum Replies Created
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Although this involves a bit of shameless advertising, FxFactory actually has a plug-in called Add Margin which is designed to get around this limitation in Motion.
Search for “Add Margin” in this page:
https://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/motionpackThe immediate advantage is that it lets you work around the limitation in Motion so that your glows can “bleed” outside the original frame size.
The downside is that the FxPlug feature that allows third-party plug-ins to resize their output does not work in Compressor or when the Motion project is directly embedded in an FCP timeline. This is true for all third-party plug-ins, unfortunately. In other words, you will have to render out your timeline from Motion (for some, this is a serious limitation).
The other method (turning on the “Fixed Resolution” in the Layer/Group tab) works great, it will render correctly outside Motion, but it may require some extra parameter setup depending on which other plug-ins you’re applying down the chain. If you’ve already keyframed point parameters, for instance, you may have to tweak your animation as a result of the image size being different.
Hope this helps,
Gabe
https://www.noiseindustries.com -
I guess the only people who’d be able to answer for sure would be Apple’s engineers, but if I’d have to make a guess I’d say that the color corrector is certainly capable of working with floating point (heck, I’d be surprised if it *ever* works at less than high-precision internally, even when its input/output is only 8 bit).
NAB is just around the corner, and that’s a great time to get answers straight from the horse’s mouth 🙂
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If the plug-in is based on the (older, discontinued) AE SDK, then it indeed forces the input/output to 8 bit.
If a plug-in is based on FxPlug, then it can optionally support high-precision (floating point math) in both RGB and YUV. A good many of our plug-ins have this support already:
https://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory
Motion only does RGB, whereas FCP is capable of high-precision rendering in YUV as well.
As a side note, the sequence setting called “Render all YUV material in high-precision YUV” is mislabeled: in reality, if you have a plug-in capable of high-precision rendering in RGB only, the high-quality “rendering path” will still kick in when this setting is on: FCP does a high-quality conversion from YUV 32 bit to RGB 32 bit. Contrary to the 8 bit conversion, this one causes virtually no loss of color information.
In Motion, you’ll also notice a 16 bit half-float option. It’s great because the quality is almost identical to 32 bit float processing at half the consumption of VRAM resources. This option can only exist in Motion, since 16 bit half-float math is only available natively on GPUs.
Hope this answers your question 🙂
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC -
I would strongly recommend *against* the MacBook. You may get FCP to run (some even make it run Motion) but the onboard graphics (the infamous Intel GMA 950) just cannot handle floating-point precision graphics (and never will). It is also lacking in many other respects, e.g. the lack of dedicated video memory. The very nerdy among you can have a look at the OpenGL capabilities here:
https://homepage.mac.com/arekkusu/bugs/GLInfo.html
In practical terms, that means you machine cannot rendering anything *that uses the GPU* on the “Render all YUV material in high-precision YUV” setting (Sequence -> Video Processing tab). In Motion, you are stuck with 8 bit rendering as well. Right now, you may think this is OK, but increasingly all apps in the Final Cut Studio suite rely on the GPU, so your investment would have very little chance to last long.
On the other hand, MacBook Pros have the very capable ATI Mobility X1600 graphics card, with at least 128MB VRAM (which is not too bad even for HD-frame processing). We use a MBP to demo our own plug-ins on the road – the model with 256MB VRAM is a feisty little machine and easily outperforms all but the very best desktop G5s. (no contest with Mac Pros, obviously)
Hope this helps your choice,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC
https://www.noiseindustries.com -
If I understand your reqs correctly, our company sells a plug-in called “Old TV” which fits the bill. It does a few things:
– adjustable rounded corners (essentially, a geometric distortion that simulates the bumpy screen)
– color adjustment to simulate old cathode ray tubes
– scanlines with adjustable thickness and opacity
– optional interference with lots of controls
– lastly (a nice touch IMHO) an optional reflection on the screen – you can even supply your own reflected graphic via an image well.https://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/images/editingpack/256/hulahoop_old_tv.jpg
For more info
https://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory
Hope this helps,
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC -
If I understand your problem correctly, it is addressed by the “Add Margin” filter. It’s a plug-in designed specifically to solve this limitation in Motion. It simply takes your input, and lets you add a margin around it so that whatever additional effects you apply to the image don’t get clipped (you essentially make the bounding box as large as it needs to be).
Here’s the before and after:https://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/images/motionpack/256/add_margin_before.jpg
https://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory/images/motionpack/256/add_margin_after.jpg
The plug-in in question is part of our FxFactory Motion Pack (https://www.noiseindustries.com/fxfactory ). May be worth your time to check it out, it you do this sort of thing often enough to justify the purchase…
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC -
Though I can’t offer a solution, your problem can only have two causes:
– your other workplace had a lot of third-party effects installed
– your installation is screwed up 🙂 What system are you on (esp. Intel vs PowerPC) and what version of Motion are you using?In general, 3rd Party Plug-in that use the older AE SDK support should not be used on Intel Macs at all. Some companies have found ways to make them work on Intel, but it’s a somewhat nasty hack. Things are a bit better on the PowerPC side. The path to these AE plug-ins is specified via one of Motion’s preferences (the last option in the first preference tab).
Newer plug-ins that use the FxPlug SDK (Apple-brewed), will not show up under the “3rd Party Effects” category. They will show up in the regular categories along with the built-in filters, which can be confusing at first. You can check for all FxPlug plug-ins installed on your system by looking into these directories:
/Library/Plug-ins/FxPlug
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/Library/Plug-ins/FxPlug -
Well in your case, you shouldn’t be using Motion 2.0 on a MacBook Pro. You should be using Motion 2.1.2, which you get with the Final Cut Studio 5.1 Universal, and one more round of automatic software updates.
The fact that Motion 2.0 even launches on your system is a testament to how good Rosetta (the PowerPC emulation layer) is 🙂
Gabe
Noise Industries, LLC -
This is what we use for most of our purchases that don’t come straight from the Apple Online Store:
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As far as I can tell, there are no compatibility issues using the latest and greatest from both companies. I never try running both apps at the same time though.