Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Walter Soyka] “What kinds of new functionality would you like to see to advance Motion toward that goal?”
Very hard to draw up a list, although the really obvious place to start looking for that list is the Ae feature set. And that’s not really what I think should be happening. It needs a lot of small improvements – all the basic stuff that they could have been working on for the last five or six years but haven’t been doing.
Some very elementary things, just off the top of my head:
Fix the tracker, which is really not fit for purpose in my view even within the very limited range of what it sets out to do.
Attend to the Clouds generator – this is a fundamental procedural building block but the current implementation is really amateurish and is a serious stumbling block to achieving good-looking results.
A proper displacement filter – you can do a few things with glass distortion, refraction and bump but it’s not enough. (EDIT: you can “roll your own” displacement effects quite effectively using combinations of tools, so this is not a big priority.)
A shatter filter – a really important tool. You can fudge shattering but it really doesn’t do the job.
More keyboard shortcut options – the fact that you can’t map some of the most basic tools really makes for an unnecessarily cumbersome workflow.
Maybe expressions – of some simple kind. Parameter behaviors can do simply amazing things if you really put your mind to it, but there are functions that you can’t engineer even with the utmost ingenuity.
Fix some of those outstanding bugs!
None of these are especially big things but they would make a significant difference to what you could get out of Motion. Some could easily be provided by third parties (come to think of it!) but there’s not much of a market for Motion-exclusive plug-ins that I can detect. You’re not going to want to spend a lot adding a basic filter or generator to a product that’s only cost you $49 in the first place …
Essentially some attention to the basic building blocks would go a very long way towards extending what you can achieve with Motion.
But most of all, please don’t let them break it – which there has to be a really massive chance of them doing …
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Mark Suszko] “Apple should be aggressively courting these third-party developers now.”
Instead of cutting them off at the knees, as they’ve just done with those nice guys at motionvfx …?
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “Instead of thinking of Motion as a tool that helps editors do quick graphics/effects/tx, Apple should develop Motion to be a tool that helps ____ do _____.”
Instead of thinking of Motion (solely) as a tool that helps editors do quick graphics/effects/tx, Apple should (also) develop Motion to be a tool that helps users who aren’t that interested in editing or simply don’t edit at all do better motion graphics and compositing.
Does that make any sense?
There are plenty of takers in that constituency, believe it or not. There are plenty of Motion users who don’t own or use FCP X. Not everyone is an editor or aspires to be an editor. Motion is a terrific gateway drug for those wanting to get into mograph and compositing but for whom the challenge and/or price of grappling with Ae or Nuke is just way too high at this point in their careers.
I happen to have acquired a reasonably in-depth insight into this community (sample size: approx. 6000) and I admire and respect their aspirations – to the point of even trying to help them realise those aspirations.
Has Apple forgotten they exist? Do they not care about them? Do they have great plans for them that we don’t know about?
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
I’m not sure I understand the question.
Isn’t that like saying what possible use could you find for Ae if not as a helper app for Pr?
But I’m sure you mean something more subtle than that …
Incidentally, I know of many, many Motion users who don’t use or own FCP X.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “Here’s how Apple positions Motion:”
Yes, I’ve noticed that there has been a distinct repositioning of Motion in the marketing blurb – as I have been trying to point, it’s now being positioned ever more firmly as the helper app for FCP X and Apple are in agreement with me on that.
Doubtless Motion X will change all that but for now this does seem to be the case.
What I’d like to see happen is very modest stuff indeed – just fix a few obvious things that could do with fixing (I mention a particularly egregious bug in another post here), and add just a few easily implemented features that would improve productivity.
Unlike many/most who ask for updates to Motion, I’m not expecting it to become Ae overnight or indeed ever, but I would like to see it treated as an actual live product in its own right, rather than the curious dormant zombie FCP X battery cell that it has become.
The first sign that all was not well for me was the crazy pricing of the Motion 5 release: Apple effectively telling us in the most obvious terms the value they decided to place on the product.
But of course Panglossian sources close to Apple tell me I’m flat out wrong to be talking this way and everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, so I’d best shut up …
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
In case anyone is interested in the answer to this question, you need to select Custom from the Render Quality menu and turn off High Quality Resampling:
Best Quality in this case is trying to smooth out the edges of your replicator’s bitmap (which is really a lot smaller than it should be for that amount of zoom) and that smoothing is the High Quality Resampling. Turning it off avoids that.
The advantage of High Quality Resampling is that it provides a good level of antialiasing and this is particularly important now that we have the 3D text tool, where you need to be careful to have this turned on in order to avoid aliasing artefacts.
Make sure you use Best Quality when rendering 3D text to avoid the “jaggies” (steppiness) in the example above.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[David Roth Weiss] “The “Motion Team” as they are often referred to are located in Venice, CA.”
I don’t know if it’s more depressing to discover that there actually is a current “Motion Team” rather than that there isn’t one.
At least if they didn’t exist, one could account for them having done nothing for the last 5+ years 😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Ronny Courtens] “Not only is there still a strong Motion team, there also is a new Product Manager for Motion who seems very ambitious. And: what Andrew said.”
I think if I were “on the Motion Team” skateboarding to work in Venice, CA, to meet up with my “ambitious new Product Manager”, I’d be pretty embarrassed that a bug like this one was still not fixed, however smug and superior I might be feeling about my shiny new “Nineties Vibe” 3D text thingy …
Here’s a blue wall, facing the camera and sitting on a red floor. Behind the blue wall are two green sidewalls, and despite what appears to be the case, the front edges of the green walls do no intersect with the blue wall, they are in fact 6 pixels back away from it in Z space.
Here’s the Top view showing the gap between the side walls and the front wall:
If we move the camera round just a bit, we can see that the problem lessens:
I call this the “edge on” bug because what is happening is that when planes are viewed more or less edge on to camera they will appear to poke through any foreground plane. Changing the angle of view makes the issue recede.
I first pointed out this bug well over a year ago and it is still not fixed in the latest release of Motion. (And yes, this is a genuine real world issue that is really tricky to combat, and yes, I do know a little bit about how Motion works.)
What does it say about a product’s development when a bug/design flaw as egregious as this remains unaddressed?
It’s all very well being super-confident about Apple’s future plans for Motion – how about being reasonably confident that they’ll getting around to doing a bit of basic bug fixing at some point?
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Ronny Courtens] “Not only is there still a strong Motion team, there also is a new Product Manager for Motion who seems very ambitious. And: what Andrew said.”
That’s great to hear – but of course, since I’m just a humble punter here with no inside track on any of it, I can only go on my perception of what’s been happening for the last five or more years. Or rather what’s not been happening.
Roll on Motion X, I say!
Meanwhile here’s Ron Brinkmann again:
“And the features that high end customers need are often very very unsexy. They don’t look particularly good in a demo. See, here’s the thing with how features happen at Apple to a great extent – product development is often driven by how well things can be demoed. Maybe not explicitly – nobody ever told me to only design features that demoed well – but the nature of the organization effectively makes it work out that way. Because a lot of decisions about product direction make their way very far up the management hierarchy …. And so the first question that comes up is ‘how are we going to show this feature within the company?’ All the mid-level managers know that they’re going to have a limited window of time to convey what makes a product or a feature special to their bosses. So they either 1) make a sexy demo or 2) spend a lot of time trying to explain why some customer feels that some obscure feature is worth implementing. Guess which strategy works best?”
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Bret Williams] “Embedding a true 3D engine is no small update. In reality This FCP 10.2 update was a motion update in that regard. “
I absolutely agree that the 3D text feature is massive, and I’d also go so far as to say it’s comfortably one of the best implementations of 3D text that I’ve seen anywhere, in terms of ease of use+performance+good-looking results. (Shame 3D text is currently so profoundly uncool!)
However, I think it’s an illustration of my point that Motion is being used as a helper app for FCP X rather than continuing development as a product in its own right. Motion has 3D text because Apple wanted to implement it in FCP X and Motion is the graphics engine for X.
Like you, I have a very long list of bugs and enhancements that I’d like to have seen addressed – and I’d have much rather have had a few of these instead of 3D text. (Like a lot of Motion users, I’d already bought mObject for that purpose – but because none of my clients would countenance seeing 3D text in anything [you can’t imagine the derision that would ensue], I haven’t yet used it for any paying job!)
One of the most basic is the ability to map more commands to the keyboard which I’ve been asking for repeatedly for years – it’s basic stuff like which really makes a difference to productivity, and to my mind there’s simply no sign that Apple will ever address any of it at all. Unlike many users, I’m not asking for spectacular feature enhancements, just some very small attention to the many details that could do with being looked at – and have remained unlooked-at for years.
I find it extraordinary that some squeaky wheel user has been able to get the Timeline keyframe copy and paste feature implemented as the only real Motion-specific feature enhancement – this is so not a priority of any kind in my view. Keyframes in the Timeline are of very little value unless you have animated only one parameter. If you work with keyframes at all, there’s no excuse not to get comfortable with the Keyframe Editor. The Timeline is fine for quickly moving keyframes where only one parameter is animated, but otherwise it’s not the thing to be using.
And please don’t get me started on the “new generators” – complete embarrassment and utterly uncalled for. I can’t imagine what Apple were thinking in wasting even five minutes on implementing this utter nonsense, though if it took them longer than five minutes it would be a disgrace. (Who “designs” this stuff? In this case, none of it is even remotely demo-worthy, so what could the point possibly have been? To my mind, Apple simply look foolish by even mentioning that they’ve done this kind of thing.) If anyone was going to take a look at the Motion generators, the really big thing to address in my view is the Clouds generator, one of the most fundamental procedural textures with countless uses, and it’s one of the areas where Motion just doesn’t offer adequate quality – compare Ae’s Fractal Noise for how it should be done, same concept, different league altogether.
As DRW points out below, Motion is not a money spinner in the same league as FCP X and is never going to get the same love for that reason, but the complete lack of attention to it in its own right now goes back four or five years at least and that’s something that I think gets lost in the razzmatazz that accompanies new features which are only there because they service FCP X, the first and most obvious of those being rigging and publishing.
[Bret Williams] “And I appreciate your tuts! Probably going to get your new keyed for sure. I do a lot of green screen in Motion.”
Many thanks. I’ll be doing a keying tutorial for Motion shortly which illustrates some very useful high-end compositing techniques for getting better results with your keys. BTW, if you are looking at Hawaiki Keyer, I should just mention that it works in FCP X, After Effects and Premiere Pro, and not just Motion 5.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com
