By Alex Lindsay, October 11, 2005
At NAB 2004, Apple Motion made a splash as a motion graphics tool (www.apple.com). It sported real-time playback, effects, and compositing while keeping the interface simple and intuitive, and did so for only $300.
Apple's sophomore release of Motion has added key production capacities such as FXPlug and 32-bit Float color support. At the same time, Motion picked up a few cool and, well, fun features such as MIDI control and the Replicator, which push the envelope of motion graphics in new directions.
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| You may think you grok Motion 2SMQ-8217-SMQs new Replicator tool, but it actually takes a while to wrap your head around it, in order to use the results for things like transitions, lower-thirds, and backgrounds. |
To answer the inevitable question early: Motion 2 still doesn't replace After Effects or really anything else, and at $300, it doesn't need to. What Motion 2.0 does do, like Motion 1.0, is make throwing together graphics painfully easy and fun. With a new G5 taking advantage of new memory slots and graphics cards, you can get 20 fps to 24 fps playback with 1080p HD footage (measly DV or SD footage is barely a peck on the surface with a top-of-the-line machine). Even on a laptop, Motion's performance is usable; that is, still faster than just about everything else. The speed does get a little intoxicating. I found myself muttering a stream of poorly chosen words at Shake and After Effects while waiting for RAM previews and flipbooks. But there's still a lot of room for Motion to grow; I'll get to that later.
Main new features
Motion now supports both 16-bit and 32-bit Float color. This little feature is imperative for motion graphics. Although 8-bit images are great, they tend to posterize when you have blurs or subtle shifts of color over a large distance-like glows. Without 32-bit Float support, Motion 1.0 showed this stairstepping quickly. Now, with version 2.0, the glows and blurs are smooth as silk. Also, new effects that take advantage of such an astronomical bit depth are possible (such as image burn in and outs). Going to 32-bit Float will adversely affect frame rates (you can preview at 8-bit if you want), so you won't use it for everything; but, like a good fisheye lens, when you need it, nothing else will do.
A feature rumored to have been created on a whim, MIDI support is one of the coolest new features in Motion 2.0. MIDI controls let you attach your favorite keyboard slider to just about any parameter quickly by "teaching" Motion which slider is connected to which device ID. You can use it for real-time adjustments, a more tactile color-corrector, or connect it to a keyer for a hardware-style solution. Remembering the MIDI connections between sessions is a little convoluted, but the feature itself brings a new level of organic experimentation to the process. See the feature "Make Motion Move" for more information on controlling Motion with MIDI.
As the name implies, the Replicator replicates. Take a basic shape and Replicator will create a variety of arrays, which is cute, but not really what sets it apart. Using the Sequence Replicator, you can control how the array appears. Rotation, Position, Opacity, even color can be animated in various ways. The results are perfect for stuff like unique transitions, lower-thirds, and backgrounds. The possibilities are endless, which is why it takes a little time to get your head around the feature. There are some basic tutorials that ship with the application, but you really need a book to understand it all. Once you get into it, you'll lose hours at a time doodling with ideas.
Integration and keyframing
Motion 1.0's plug-ins were breathtakingly fast, but third-party plug-ins that couldn't take advantage of the GPU slowed the project to a crawl. Apple has now released the FXPlug architecture to allow developers to take advantage of the superfast graphics cards the company hopes you have if you are using Motion in the first place. The speed increases are dramatic, sometimes as much as 100 times the comparable CPU speeds. As with much of Motion, you get used to real-time speed and it makes other applications (such as After Effects and Final Cut Pro) seem like they are standing still. If nothing else, FXPlug makes Motion a plat-form for third-party developers to build stunningly fast tools. It's surprising not to see more developers jumping in.
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| You can now bring Motion files unrendered into After Effects, which will see .mov files as a QuickTime file to be rendered on the fly. |
You can now bring Motion files unrendered into After Effects. Add ".mov" to the end of the file name and After Effects thinks it's looking at a QuickTime file, but it's actually rendering a Motion file on the fly. This integration-which is also available for DVD Studio Pro, Shake, and Final Cut Pro-makes working in both applications much easier. Designers can take advantage of what Motion can do quickly (such as Replicator) while still relying on After Effects to build their final work.
Motion 2.0 is decidedly better at keyframing than the previous version. You can now auto-key specific attributes and add keyframes to the last adjusted parameter without nearly as much work. Although the keyframes themselves are temporal and spatial, Motion 2 adds a "Motion Path" behavior, which in some ways is better than the After Effects implementation because you finally have true F-Curves and Motion Paths in the same place. Overall, the keyframing process is much better than in the somewhat frustrating version 1.0.
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| Motion 2SMQ-8217-SMQs new Motion Path Behavior lets you separate time and space. You can now lay out a motion path and then use an F-Curve to control how the object gets from the beginning to the end. |
Motion 2.0 takes its first swing at 3D. Essentially, you get a basic plane as a Distort Filter. This is probably one of the biggest areas that Apple needs to address. 3D space is very important and nearly overlooked in this update.
Motion in motion
Here are a few things that would be great to see in version 3. First, 3D has become an extremely important part of motion graphics. Apple needs to expand the 3D capabilities of Motion and really feature 3D. This is the biggest thing that seems to be missing in the application.
Second, Motion itself needs more graphics horsepower to support its already impressive performance. Given that Apple owns both the hardware and the software, the company should be aware that high-end cards (Nvidia's Quadro cards come to mind) and more RAM slots would turn Motion into something far scarier. I hope we'll see these hardware adjustments buttressing Motion's already impressive infrastructure.
Third, given Motion 2's performance, it would be great to add video capture to the arsenal. Capture would allow for myriad real-time effects and stuff like real-time keying. A MIDI controller combined with Motion could give a high-end keyer like Ultimatte a run for its money.
Fourth, tracking is also something would be a welcome addition to Motion's toolset. Sure, that's what Shake is for, but there are many motion graphics applications for tracking. It really should be treated by Apple like a foundation tool, not an option dedicated to visual effects alone.
Finally, Motion's performance begs for rotoscoping tools. Although some good solutions, such as SilhouetteFX Roto, are finally filling the vacuum left by Pinnacle's nearly criminal neglect of Commotion, Motion could be a solid roto tool with a few key features: Tracking and B-splines (that go through the control vertices) are the first to come to mind.
Bottom line
Although calling this a full 2.0 is a slight stretch (1.5 would have sufficed), this is a solid update to an application that becomes both more powerful and more fun at the same time. It's useful now, but it promises bigger and better things in the future.
Motion's integration with After Effects makes it a perfect partner for roughing out ideas and pulling together elements that are cumber-some in After Effects. At $300, Motion is barely even an expensive plug-in for the venerable application. Now included in Apple Final Cut Studio (which most editors seem to be upgrading to), many more people will get to play with it.
Motion jumped from 8-bit to 32-bit Float in one upgrade. It would be nice to see the same kind of improve-ment in the 3D system, which is the most glaring shortcoming. That said, Motion is a great application as it is and stunning at $300.
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