Jason Watson
Forum Replies Created
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I was more referring to the entire process; for example, in my experience CC15 doesn’t get as bogged down in the UI as Motion does (at least with the project I was working on), which at least for me greatly speeds up the whole process. I found that the playback during creation was faster and more consistent as well; both apps suffer during playback with complex projects, but in my experience Ae plays it back more consistently, whereas with Motion it is sometimes a crap shoot as far as a RAM Preview goes. Could be system quirks, who knows.
I have rendered almost every project with CC2014 since the day CC2015 came out as a part of my workflow, so I guess that doesn’t really figure into it for me. But I do a lot of animated characters and tend to use lots of shapes and expressions as well, and I haven’t yet had CC2015 give me any significant problems.
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[Bret Williams] “I’ve been having to dig back into AE the last few weeks and it’s tough to go back to AE and deal with the performance hit once you’ve gotten used to Motion.”
I had a similar albeit opposite experience having to go back to Motion to modify a template after being used to Ae. The performance hit was also similar; I found that Ae CC2015 churned through the somewhat complex project more quickly (and consistently) in comparison. I actually ended up recreating the project in Ae to save time.
I agree that it would be nice to have groups in Ae; when I first started in Ae from Motion it really got to me that it didn’t have them, but now I’d definitely take precomps over groups if I had to choose, which may be related to my particular workflow.
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[Marcus Moore] “And I think that (to me) is Motion’s real achilles heel. As great as Ae is, a lot of the most advanced functionality comes from 3rd party support from Trapcode, Mocha, Video Copilot ect… and while Motion does have great support from companies like Motion VFX and Tokyo Productions, the above guys are missed.”
For me this is a crucial aspect of Ae. When I originally moved from Motion to Ae, it didn’t seem like that big of a leap; for what I was doing at least the core functionality seemed fairly interchangeable (although I eventually realized this wasn’t really true). But once I started understanding just how extensible Ae was through the sheer amount of 3rd party plugins, scripts, training, tutorials, etc., I realized that much of its value is precisely in that, at least for me.
For me at least it’s beyond just effects and such; there are scripts and the like (as an example) that make the actual workflow easier and more efficient for me to manage that Motion doesn’t have, at least as of the last time I was working heavily in it. I think that it’s because of this that even if Motion suddenly got feature and functionality parity with Ae, it still probably wouldn’t cause me to switch back; I’d love to see Apple give it a go, although I’m doubtful they have that sort of scenario in mind for Motion.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “It’s not that they’re pushing it “up front” – it’s that they’re not pushing anything else about Motion at all! Again, that’s a crying shame. FCP X integration is cool – but it’s just a tiny fraction of what you can do with Motion, as you know.”
I’d definitely agree with this, and it was one of the most frustrating and disappointing things for me back when I was heavily using Motion. To me the feature set bump from Motion 3 to Motion 4 was pretty significant, and at the time I thought it portended more in regards to how Apple would be developing it. But when Motion 5 came out and the biggest update (from what I remember) was the rigging, I thought it was cool, but not being an FCPX user it seemed like the app was going in a direction other than I was.
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I used it pretty heavily for probably 5 years or so exclusively for motion graphics, but eventually I reached the point where it lacked the capability to do what I wanted and needed, and so I sort of made a cold turkey switch over to Ae. I really liked Motion, and hoped it would turn into a major Ae competitor, but I eventually realized it was probably going to be more of an effects generator for FCPX and so I never looked back. After using Ae for the past 5 years, it would be almost impossible to go back, as there are workflow and functionality aspects for me that Motion either couldn’t accommodate or would make harder to pull off. I’d love to see it developed more, but I don’t think that’s what Apple has in mind for it.
At any rate, I only know of a couple people in my circles that use Motion for motion graphics creation, and a lot of that is modifying pre-existing templates. I know that when I was using it I always got odd looks and people were surprised that I was able to make what I was making with it, which is hopefully a compliment to it.
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Put a Hue/Saturation filter on the clip and keyframe the saturation to ‘0’ at the point where you want it to start gaining color. Then move forward in time to where you want it to be full color and keyframe the saturation to ‘1.’
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Without seeing your project it’s hard to know exactly what the problem is, but you should be able to get smooth motion. Here are a couple things to try with what you’re doing:
Instead of manually aligning the arrow’s rotation, try using the ‘Snap to Alignment’ behavior. This will automatically turn the arrow in alignment with the path.
If you do manually keyframe it, make sure the keyframes are set to bezier. It’s usually best to try and use as few keyframes as you can, but you’ll probably have to get into the keyframe editor and finesse the curves to get the smoothness you want and the timing you want.
Hope that helps!
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I’m not sure what you mean by the last part of what you want to do.
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While I think there is a way around this, whenever I have tried a ‘send to motion’ (from fpc7) it sends it to Motion 5, which doesn’t work, at least in my experience. I’ve always found the round-tripping between FCP and Motion to be more trouble than it’s worth, so I’ve never really bothered to try and see if I could still make it work with earlier versions of Motion.
I agree about missing the real-time-ish capabilities of Motion in going to AE. In that respect it is definitely faster, but in my experience Motion has ended up being more unstable- random crashes, unreliable RAM previews, trouble exporting, etc. Even though AE has its share of crashes and frustrations, on the whole I have found it to be more stable and responsive, even though it ends up being slower (sometimes) in animating. I say that as someone who really likes Motion but is finding that on the whole AE has less hair-pulling moments.
As far as Motion 5 as a stand-alone: definitely. I’ve used it a lot like that and it works just fine. I’ve not used it with FCPX and Compressor, so I can’t comment on how well it integrates with them.
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It seems to me that you should be able to have the spout visible (in the layer timeline sense) the entire time, as long as it is under the cap layer. Your layer hierarchy would look something like this, from top to bottom:
Cap
Spout
ShakerSince the cap will be completely over the spout, you should just have to move the cap to reveal the spout. As Stephen mentioned, this would probably work more easily if you group everything but the cap into a group. Depending on the look you are going for, instead of using Write On for every layer, it might be easier and more cohesive to use a mask on the shaker group to reveal everything. I would probably make an over-arching group with a sub-group so you can animate the shaker as a whole and the cap separately from that. Your hierarchy would look like this-
{Group} (Reveals, Shakes, rotates into pour)
Cap (flies off)
[Sub-group]
Spout
ShakerHope that helps.