Motion Vs Shake vs AE

Hello: I would like to know what is the main difference between Motion, Shake and AE? Aren't they all compositing/graphics animation programs?

There are a lot of ways to describe these but here's one:

Motion: primarily for motion graphics, layer-based

Shake: primarily for VFX, nodal-based

AE: does both, layer-based

Thx for the response. So AE would be the choice then. Since my business usually wouldn't require VFX. AE is node based as well isn't it. My only concern with AE would be its convenience to work with FCP. I had an external DVD authoring program and it worked but not nearly as great as DVD Pro. So I wonder how good a third party program goes with FCP?

Thanks'

AE is is layer based.

If you are using FCS I would use Motion - learning curve isn't as steep, great integration with FCP and DVDSP, and a tremendous amount of content for building your projects - and if you own Final Cut Studio you already have Motion.

i second that.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Shake is a compositing program, and a very good one. It's designed solely to assemble shots from different elements, using mathematical operations to combine them. The learning curve is pretty steep, especially if one doesn't already have a solid conceptual understanding of compositing, but it's immensely powerful, and God knows the price is right.

Motion is purely for motion graphics. It was designed from the ground up to make it as fast as possible to create motion graphics for television, and as such it's pretty limiting. I've found Motion to be the right choice for creating something that's pretty good and done quickly, and the wrong choice for creating something that's exactly what I want.

After Effects is a graphics program, like Motion, but because it's both pretty old and wildly popular, it's been extended with plug-ins to do a pretty good job as a compositor or even a color-corrector. It's not the perfect compositing tool, nor is it the perfect color corrector, but it's possible to do feature-quality work with it if you're willing to adapt to some slightly oddball workflows. AE's strength is in creating graphics, and since unlike Motion AE's renderer is CPU-based, it's massively parallelized and screaming-fast.

After Effects doesn't "work with" Final Cut Pro, any more than any other graphics tool "works with" any other editing system. The workflow pipeline from After Effects to Final Cut is Quicktime movies. You render a movie or an image sequence from AE and (in the case of a sequence, after converting it to a Quicktime) bring it into Final Cut as a media asset. This is how you should be using Motion as well, even though Motion has some kinda half-baked and really not all that useful features for rendering its project files right on the FCP timeline.

Jeff.

Just curious. What makes bringing over the .motn files into fcp to render "half-baked" to you. I know for me if it is many many layers I find it just better to render it out in Motion and then import the movie. True. But for many things it works well and rather nice to be able to easily revise and have it update in the timeline. What are your beefs?

Geo