[Marcus Moore]

Over at the FCP.co forums. At least one person has had their order status go from “Processing Order” to “Preparing for Shipment” to “Shipped” within 24 hrs.

[Marcus Moore]

It may come down to an uneven distribution of units globally, depending on how they’re handling global orders.

I’m betting this is a backlog of CPUs from Intel.

[Marcus Moore]

I haven’t heard of anyone who’s initial ship date said “February” begging changed. Hopefully they were super-conservate with their ship estimates.

[Marcus Moore]

My 8-core, otherwise maxed out, machine; ordered December 26th, is still showing February shipping here in Canada.

[Marcus Moore]

Yeah, I knew I’d mixed up my companies after I hid “Post”.

But my question still stands. We’ve heard relatively little about FXPlug3 support in Motion and FCPX except that it should enable custom interfaces. Hopefully NAB will bring some announcements about what this might mean more specifically for new 3rd party tools.

[Marcus Moore]

It is. Though sadly I hardly ever get to use it now that I lean so heavily on Motion.

I wonder if FXPlug3 support means that a plugin like Particular would be easier for VideoCopilot to migrate to Motion now.

[Marcus Moore]

I know you’re prefacing this as stuff that should be built into Motion, but in this case I think the analogy to AE is very apt. Some very specialized functionality is always going to be better as a plugin, and AEs real strength in functionality is in large part attributed to it’s 3rd party plugin support.

AE has built-in particles, but anyone who’s serious uses Particular.

AE has built-in 3D text, but its not a shadow on Element 3D.

Same thing with 3D Camera Tracking.

Same thing with Lensflare.

So I don’t think we should OVERLY handicap Motion in this regard- saying it should have everything you list built in.

You can still create editable templates you can publish to FCPX using plugins mObject or mFlare. MotionVFX themselves are releasing customizable packs for Broadcast News and Sports intros and graphics.

Anyway. All I’m saying is that a product like Motion, priced at $50, is only going to have so much built in functionality; and like AE will see it’s feature set augmented by plug-ins. Undeniably, Motion is the most powerful motion graphics tool in it’s price-range.

That’s not to say I don’t think it can’t improve:

Of course, Roundtrip to Motion. Much like FCP7 had really, except it works.

Broadcast Monitoring support needs to come back.

I would like to see better 3D tracking support. The only real solution at this stage is SynthEyes, and external application. Though it is a REALLY great tracker, so I’m not sure a less capable, built-in one would be that beneficial.

I’d like to see a better Particle system. But again I think that’s probably going to be left to 3rd parties.

Let’s not forget that Motion 5.1 added FXPlug3 support. We have yet to see what that will bring in terms of 3rd party plugins.

Right now it’s #49 on the Mac App Store Top Grossing list. And I think Motions usefulness as a motion graphics generator for FCPX will probably mean an overall boost in it’s user-base.

If that’s the case, then it becomes a more attractive opportunity for guys like RedGiant or VideoCopilot.

Overall, it’s hard to peg where Motion development is going to go. Apple certainly has no interest in making it a serious compositing/special effects competitor.

However, I think Adobe’s move to subscription pricing has left and enormous opportunity for low-end disruptors. Most people only use a faction of the power in PS or AE, and after using Motion pretty much exclusively for the better part of 4 years- I think a good chunk of people who are using AE could do what their doing in Motion. So perhaps that’s an opportunity.

[Marcus Moore]

If you’re just editing your music, and you don’t want to tie those edits to specific visuals, I tend to put the musician a storyline vs a compound clip.

[Marcus Moore]

While pretty consistently in the top 25, FCPX is often ranked below both Logic and Aperture, except after a major update when it jumps up. So if higher overall volume cancels out highest price, I’d be surprised if FCPX is more than half of ProApps sales. But that’s just a my guess.

[Marcus Moore]

Horace is a pretty smart guy. And he always tries to be clear when his data is interpretative.

I listen to his podcast THE CRITICAL PATH regularly- and he did a segment a few months ago about how he’d been trying to backtrack iTunes revenue numbers based on various pieces of information that Apple does release publicly during keynotes, quarterly earnings calls, and investor meetings.