January 21, 2009

Motion: Comme Ci, Comme Ça

Translation: "Like This, Like That." After frustration in early attempts to use Apple's Motion, it could be easy to just ignore it even if there's still some feature-envy, especially with templates for very quick work, as well as the intuitive 3D interface. After seeing Oliver Peters' quick comments on Motion, a read of The Top Ten Things After Effects Users Love and Hate about Motion by Mark Spencer seemed appropriate.

Here's Oliver Peters comments from FinalCutPro-L:

"I'm in the camp that feels Motion is flakey at best and that AE is far better, but Motion is still worth learning. It rounds out many missing elements of FCP when used together with FCP. For example:

- better scaling than FCP

- only way to do proper 2.5 DVE work

- only way to do 3D DVE work, including with 3D lighting
- proper time remapping / speed ramps

- tracking

- functional green/blue screen keying


Give it another spin. I do find that it is very, very temperamental with some graphics cards. It also suffers from preference corruption that can give you some really weird results. And every now and then, you can create a project on one machine that simply will not open on another. Go figure."

Update: more on Apple Motion can be found at All About Motion, Motion Smarts, Creative Cow, and even Andrew Kramer's sole video on Motion that explains compositing with Motion's Comp sets/ Layer sets/ pre-Comp metaphor. Apple has overview movies for a nice feature tour.

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