Gareth Randall
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Dan,
It’s not what you want to hear, but I’ve experienced Motion suddenly turning snarky on me several times. It’s always when I’m deep inside a project, usually just as I start to think “I’ve nearly finished”.
Some problems are traceable and fixable, such as paint strokes suddenly not rendering any more – somehow, the Shape Style on the strokes gets deselected (and not through operator error) and you have to go back and reselect it.
Another fixable problem is the video suddenly starting to render with major artefacts. The solution here is to paste all your groups into a new project.
Other problems are just unfixable, such as Motion rendering at quarter-res Draft quality even though you’ve got everything forcing it to full res Normal or Best.
Just for the record, it’s a bit of a mantra of mine, but trashing the prefs has NEVER fixed any problem I’ve had in Motion, ever. I’ll try it every time, but it NEVER makes any difference.
I’ve occasionally wondered if the spec of the machine makes any difference to Motion’s stability, since some people never seem to have any problems. I do all my work on a 2006 MacBook Pro 2.16GHz, which maxes out at 2Gb RAM and 256Mb graphics and my OS and software are always up-to-date, so maybe Motion really prefers significantly more RAM? The beefiest possible graphics card is obviously a huge consideration, given the way Motion works.
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Don’t forget that Motion does all its heavy work using the GPU, not the CPU.
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I transferred the project to a brand-new Mac Pro at work, and I’m getting the exact same problem.
It’s confined to one particular part of the project where I’m using replicators; the sections before and after are fine. Would anyone be willing to download the project with the media (it’s about 300Mb) and see if they can work out what the heck is going on?
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Cool, thanks for that. The Animation codec is only 8-bit though. Given my concern about wanting gradients to look as good as possible when projected onto a large screen, would it actually make more sense for me to work at 16-bit depth and then export as 10-bit uncompressed or as a targa sequence?
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Lovely though Motion is in many respects, it does have a few baffling or flat-out annoying quirks, as you’ve discovered 😉 It seems logical to me that generators, titles etc should make the trip from FCP to Motion, so it’s weird that they don’t.
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You’re using a generator, so you either export as an animation or you recreate the generator within Motion.
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[Ralph Parker] “I know it’s preferred to use TIFFs or PNG”
It is? Genuine question there. I’ve never got hung up over image formats, all I’ve ever cared about is the image size and quality. I’ve used hundreds of JPGs over the years with no problems.As to your specific problem, it might help if you could upload a clip to illustrate exactly what you mean. All I can think of is that perhaps it’s an issue with the DPI setting of the stills being too high? Did you rescale the images before importing them into Motion or is Motion itself doing the rescaling?
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Thanks guys. I guess I really need to find enough spare cash to buy a reasonable Mac Pro 😉
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[Jonathan Ziegler] “Try putting some small tracking points on screen with a slow camera move.”
Also, you’ve used lots of thin lines against a background that also contains lots of lines, so the HUD gets a little lost. A more neutral background would help, along with thickening up the lines and playing with blend modes, soft blur and glows so that they look a bit more glowy and holographic. It all looks a bit too hard-edged and clean at the moment. Some occasional opacity changes/flickers might help with the sense of a projected image too.
Jonathan’s point about the flatness of the image is the key one though, I think. What really sells HUDs in movies and on TV is their 3D-ness.
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Use particle emitters, with their speed set to zero?
It’s probably possible to do it with replicators too, but I’m not in front of Motion so I couldn’t immediately suggest a way. I’m more familiar with emitters than replicators 😉