[Richard Squires]

Sorry. I was talking frame rate accuracy. When I output to a broadcast monitor I don’t get locked 25 fps or 30 fps. I have tried both NTSC and PAL and neither play without dropping either to 29 fps in NTSC or between 21 and 25 fps PAL.

I gave up on Motion and went back to After Effects. As soon as you try to edit Motions effects they act very strangely. Must be something I am doing wrong but managed in a very short time to replicate what I was doing in AE. Which is a shame as I really like the simulation effects in Motion.

regards

Richard

[Richard Squires]

I have just done a test and sure enough, NTSC works fine. I used one of the lower 3rd templates, and this outputs to the monitor fine. There is occasional fps changing between 29 and 30 so the fps isn’t consistent, but it appears fine. The Pal template doesn’t fare so well, going down to 21 at some stages, but still bouncing between 24 and 25. So this is the reason I would say that Motion is not broadcast ready for PAL material.

In the US people forget that there are any other formats aside from NTSC. I know I worked there for 2 years.

regards

Richard

[Richard Squires]

Hi Jim

If you can enlighten me on how to get uninterrupted real time ram previews with Motion, with Pal material I would be very grateful. I realise “hobby” is a bit harsh, and Motion has many virtues, but fps consistency ain’t one of them.

regards

Richard

[Richard Squires]

Consistently with Motion I find myself reluctantly returning to After Effects. Indeed at the moment I have a problem with text animation where the text loses it’s tracking values when I put a random motion to explode the text. Why does this happen? I have been using After Effects for roughly 7 years and it has improved dramatically in terms of being a production tool. I don’t think Motion is in the same league ( obviously it’s a young program in comparison), but I desperately want to use it, because there are things about it that beat After Effects hands down.

However I don’t know what system you are running but I get consistent 25 fps ram previews in AE on my dual g5 with 720×576 comps. In version 7 there are slight anomalies if you don’t have the correct frame size, but in general I can trust what I am seeing to be fps accurate. This is not the case with Motion, where you have to deselect everything, and hide the timeline, to get anywhere near an uninterrupted frame rate. Perhaps you are using NTSC and that is why you get better frame rates. This is not the case with PAL. And without a broadcast monitor output that is fps accurate the application isn’t broadcast ready in my opinion. Maybe “hobbyist” was a bit harsh, but although I use Motion for certain things, I wouldn’t finish stuff on it. I find the renderings slightly fuzzy and not as good quality wise as After Effects.

My intention was not to trash Motion and as I have stated I really do like it’s workflow. It’s just frustrating at times and the fps thing just hobbles it in my opinion.

regards

Richard

[Richard Squires]

hmmmm. Realtime output on computer, not realtime on a broadcast monitor. That’s why Motion for the moment is a hobby not a production tool.

[Richard Squires]

yeah I just did that and in fact I had old prefs from an old install that I used from another drive. However you lose your most recent jobs list which I use all the time. It’s a pain but at least I can get back to some sort of normality fairly quickly now. It happened again after I posted!

regards

rich

[Richard Squires]

I read elsewhere that the ATI drivers are working for Mac, but Nvidia’s aren’t. I believe they are being updated thoughso maybe it’s worth a word to Nvidia

regards

Richard

[Richard Squires]

Depends on the size of the movie and what codec you are using. I know you said animation and that should play back without stuttering, but if the movie is too large there may be a problem. I have a 733 G4 and I know for a fact that it won’t play the new h264 720p size movies from the Quicktime site. They play fine on my G5 Dual 2.0

I’d say it’s time to upgrade

regards

rich

[Richard Squires]

Hi Stretch

Thanks for the reply. That’s very disappointing. It is really one area that I do feel short changed on with Macs. I use Cinema 4D and it too has low OGL benchmarks because of the poor OGL implementation in OSX. By the way what machine do you have?

So do you just switch OGL off and use adaptive resolution instead when using After Effects?

Again thanks for the heads up

regards

Richard

[Richard Squires]

Who is the vendor? I have seen 21st Feb from Streetwise in Victoria. 8th sounds a little better

regards

rich