motion question (obviously)

I cut lots of short docs that have MANY pan and zoom/pic moves. i use ae for a few primary things:

-fixing ntsc 'flicker' of moving pics with fine lines such as illustrations thru the excellent interlace flicker filter (although also achieved thru photoshop via gaussian blur so not AS huge)

-easy ease as it is....easy (and elegant IMO)

- super friendly masking tools for multi layered stuff that needs to be clean as i do NOT understand the FCP garbage matte AT ALL - i might(most likely) be slow, but I find it brilliantly unituitive whereas in AE , with the pen tool, I can just make my mask/matte 1,2,3.

- keyframe interpolation that instantaneously fixes the speed up/slow down of the zoom 'math' issue

can motion do these things without going into manipulting the graphical bezier curves things (i find that pretty hard to mainpulate)

also can you render/output any kind of codec that fcp has? like blackmagic 8bit?

this is NOT a comparison post, I know they are VASTLY different applications. It's just I would LOVE to use an application like motion for its communication with fcp. but without 'easy' fast features like above, i feel i'm better off sticking to ae. so i figured i'd just ask directly if it has what I need. My only experience with Motion is playing with it at the dv expo in NYC before it's release, but couldn't really get in too deep (and they only had a goofy demo media thing to play with) and reading it's promo pages at apple. Just trying to cut to the chase.

thanks tons guys.
fp

Motion can do all the things you list. I just completed a short corporate video piece and animated about a dozen or so photos with Motion - something I would normally do in After Effects because it's so difficult to combine zooms and pans cleanly in FCP.

Overall, I'd say Motion does a good job - it's fun to use the Record Animation feature and to get immediate playback. The drawbacks for someone used to AE, IMHO, are:

-you can drop in a bunch of photos and automatically sequence them like in AE, based on the order you selected them (nice!) but you can't add a default amount of overlap for fades.

-max resolution due to the current crop of graphics cards is 2048x2048 (although I believe the new Nvidia 6800 allows larger sizes? Anyone?). Even with this max, you can use larger pix - they are just cropped outside of the Canvas area.

-working in the keyframe editor is more difficult, especially because x and y position keyframes are separated.

-to animate the anchor point instead of position for accurate move/scaling around the anchor point, you have to use the Inspector - can't drag in the Canvas because the Anchor Point tool in the Canvas defaults to a Pan Behind behavior.

I'm about to embark on a much larger motion control project and I'm really torn as to which app to use -- any other thoughts out there?

Mark

thanks mark. just the type of answer I'm looking for: work flow/ease/ae.

thanks a million. interesting stuff your bring up. also, most telling to me is you're still on the fence with the new project. it's tough trying to figure stuff like that out. you have the pro/con issues floating around endlessly...

the motion question has been nipping at my heels because the IDEA of it is so amazing. I WANT it to replace ae (for me - i mean).

ps - does motion have 'parenting'?

thanks again
fp

ps - does motion have 'parenting'?

Yes - well, sort of. It has "nesting" or "grouping": objects are contained in layers, and layers act as objects, so if you apply an effect (filter, behavior, mask, keyframe) to a layer, it affects all the objects in the layer. You can't tie one parameter directly to another ala AE, but you can "precompose" in order to do some more complex animations.

ok. thanx again!
fp

Yes, the 6800 allows up to 4096x4096 I do believe.

Graeme

Graeme,

Yes it does go to that size, but slows down to almost unusable.

I had a project with a 3000 x 3000 element that gave Motion a large hit as soon as it was in a layer.

But then again a project that too over 8 minutes to render now completes in under a minute and a half ;-)

Peter