Filip Vandueren's Blog

I've never played with Motion (I bought FCP & DVDSP, and never felt the need to upgrade to the studio), although I've sometimes wondered if Motion wasn't a better tool for some simple jobs.

But looking at the pressreleases begs the question: is Motion still AE's little brother ?
It used to look and feel like an iApp that found it's way in a pro-studio, but here are some observations on it's latest incarnation:

The biggest surprise for me is the tracker in Motion. On first inspection (OK, it's just looking at the few Quicktimes on Apple.com), it appears to be accurate, fast and it has way better control over stabilizing footage than AE.
Haven't played with AECS3 yet, but I've heard nothing of an update to the tracker engine: a big mistake IMO: it's one of the areas where After Effects is still an easy target for people calling it an amateur app.

Motion has 3D layers now, a camera, lights (probably the lighting quality & quantity is limited by the openGL cacacities of your GPU) and it includes 3D text with individual characters flying around.
AECS3 also introduces 'per character 3D', but consider it's here 5 releases after adobe introduced 3D layers.

Motions Audio Behaviours can be compared to Trapcode's Soundkeys, but wow, it's right there in the app with very clean previewing of the audio, and more importantly, no 3rd party stuff needed. Puts AE's Convert Audio to Keyframes functionaity to shame.

I know that After Effects will always be my choice for putting together larger projects, because of it's pre-comping, and I absolutely love motionscripting the hell out of every pixel on screen, but perhaps that's my idée fixe.
And I can't count the times when I loathed waiting for another ram-preview with portions of the timeline that were finished two days ago.

Would having motion-projects chained together in an FCP timeline proove a better workflow ?
Andwould that be that different from doing the same in Premiere, back on the (intel)-mac ?

I'm still not certain if I should fork out for both full video-suites, or mix and match FCP + AE.

Time may tell... Your views ?

Posted by: Filip Vandueren on Apr 16, 2007 at 10:21:39 am

Comments (3)

after effects, apple, nab, final cut pro

Comments:

real quality of lights & 3D on Motion?
by Andrius Simutis on Apr 18, 2007

I think the real test will be how good the lighting and 3D effects look on Motion. Maybe it's the Motion users who are to blame thus far, but I can always spot the use of Motion in low budget videos...it just doesn't look quite right, kinda like how text in FCP on DV looks. I'm hoping that the new release of Motion is a usable tool, since for the money it's hard to beat. I'm buying the new AE for sure, and I'll be upgrading FCP, so when I have some time I'll dip into Motion and see what it can do. Here's to hoping that we get another worthy tool with Motion.

I vote for AECS3 (for now)
by Sterling_76 on Apr 16, 2007

[Updated with a quote from the AECS3 FAQ]

The reasoning is quite simple:

All the bells and whistles Apple seems to have incorporated into Motion 3 appear to be a spontaneous response to 1.) Adobe's Dynamic Link and 2.) Adobe making their video suite Intel OS X capable. Granted, Apple has had plenty of time to ~~reverse engineer~~ develop their own 3D capabilities into Motion 3.

I know a few people that use Macs and have both FCP suite and After Effects for the After Effects goodness. But, how well will the new FCP suite integrate with PSCS3 Extended and it's enhanced video capabilities? The real Motion 3 killer will be that* Adobe adds multiprocessor support into AECS3 instead of having to rely on Nucleo Pro. That's the only thing I can foresee being a reason to use the FCP suite over the CS3 suite. And, having a Mac helps.

*Performance improvements
Take full advantage of multiprocessor and multicore systems to render multiple frames simultaneously during RAM previews and final renders.

Quick question, since I got dugg down on digg for saying the same thing: How much of a video production workflow marketshare would Apple get if they made the FCP suite a true Universal Binary so people could use the apps in Windows and/or Linux systems?

I agree on Apple being reactionary
by Filip Vandueren on Apr 16, 2007

... but look at the pace at which they do so ! I can only applaud the leaps and bounds Motion seems to make from release to release: they're already at floating point precision, and seem to have a respectable 3d engine.

Indeed, Motion looks like a copycat of AE's in some respects, but they implement it in a fundamentaly different app: a realtime designer.

As for your question: probably a lot, but you're looking at it from a software users perspective.

They want "Mac Pro" marketshare, not FCP marketshare. Remember Apple is in the business of seling machines, they want FCP to the first thing you think about when you think about editing, so you naturally buy a mac. Same thing for the iPod, they're not in the business of selling songs.

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