Aw, man. As difficult as Shake was to pick up, it's a ridiculously powerful tool, and I actually enjoyed learning and using it it. I'm kinda sad to see it discontinued.
too true. i haven't used it in a couple/few years, and have forgotten everything i learned i am sure, but i enjoyed it immensely.
Shake is/was a very nice tool. It had a good run as a super cheap top-of-the-line tool for those that could fit it into their pipeline. I still have hope for "Phenomenon", but it gets less and less likely. Unless Apple has something amazing it will be a hard market to crack.
Motion is to Shake as GarageBand is to Logic Studio. Does that help in understanding the differences?
I'm actually pretty surprised that this is even news. Shake was discontinued years ago and a good chunk of the team (myself included) have long since moved on. Apple doesn't build products for high end niche markets... the support requirements alone make it uninteresting to them. As for 'Phenomenon', I believe it's hanging out with the Yeti in Area 51...
AE must have been drastically improved since I last used it, because it has a very steep learning curve. With Motion 3 or 4, it's possible to very quickly get in and out of Motion to complete the task. To someone who has used AE for years, this may be a different story thanks to close familiarity with the program.
You're right - it has dramatically improved. Mostly as a result (I believe) of the competition. AE nowadays (and in fact the entire CS3/4 suite) is unrecognisable from a few ears ago. CS4 Bridge gives a easy and intuitive hub for transferring between apps and browsing material.
Motion IS used by smaller setups, or 'one man bands' in my experience, or to run templates set up by others pros that can be used in FCP - often with content designed on AE ironically. As an aside, AE also does GPU acceleration these days...
However, Motion templates used in FCP are a great example of the borked integration in FCS (like the recently improved round-tripping between FCP and Color) - they work fine, but are so slow to render on a FCP timeline, it's quicker to just render out the gfx in Motion than use the template in FCP. Certainly, much of this looks to be improved in FCS3 (or FCS as it's now called again). AE comps work seemlessly in PPro or Encore. In FCS, there were often issues between apps. Hopefully FCS(2009) improves on this situation.
That is interesting that even they cite no examples of pros using Motion. That's interesting, but not damning evidence. Perhaps the very sophisticated motion graphics work remains AE, and Motion is being used for quick comps? I don't know... Let's hear from more working motion graphics pros.
Chiming in: I am a working motion graphics pro and i could urinate all over the motion install disc and not think twice about it.
The short of it is: Video/design people stick to what that know and what works. After effects is on version 9. Motion only on 4. its been ruling in its sector for over twice as long as motion has even existed, much less been able to do any 3D stuff.
When Motion 3 was released I wanted so badly to like it. I got the new FCS package and vowed to do my next few projects in Motion. For those who do not work in motion graphics let me set the record straight. Motion has a few good things going for it. Nice interface, simplified. Less buttons to click than AE. GFX card accelerated means I can put 4 or 5 HD videos on a timeline randomly in 3D space and have the project still playback and a moderate framerate (note, this is a good thing. AE cannot do this). A lot of the "click and drag-ness" of the rest of Apples UI implementations spill over into Motion and that is cool. Motion has some nifty particle emitters which make it easy to bedazzle your project with. BUT all of that comes crashing to the f*cking ground when the app crashes more than amy winehouse circa 2008. Seriously i cannot remember one time where I have gotten through any project that was HD (and just 720p) where the interface didnt glitch/lock up. And whats worse is that when it glitches, sometimes it doenst crash altogether, sometimes you click on a tab or simple parameter and it just spinwheel-of-deaths for 45 seconds before activating what you just clicked on. When you are used to clicking a UI element ( a down arrow in a scroll bar OR 'File', Edit, View, etc in the menubar) and in less than 4.5 NANOseconds having your click be registered and the UI updated... 45 seconds until response is maddening. This has happened on every computer i have used Motion on from the paltriest macbook that probably shouldnt have even had that app installed on it.. to a mac pro with the most expensive components in it. and everyt computer in between. Stability is FAR from anywhere a pro can use on a regular basis. it just plain sucks in the amount of layers and processes it can handle and it caps out at really too low of a number for any large project.
Also, there is no real plugin support. There are tons of plugin, many of which are extremely powerful and scalable that are available for AE or other apps that simply aren't available for motion. That sucks. The only thing i use motion for .. sometimes.. is lower thirds... and only because you can embed the motion project file into the final cut timeline and have it autoupdate your FCP project whenever you make a change over in motion. nice. but thats all. I have vowed to never use Motion again for a real motion graphic project because i want to punch a baby every time I use it. AE is not 100% stable but it handles large projects with many layers like a champ. AE also works with this idea of "compositions" being like little nuggets of designs and animations you can create. You can nest those comps within larger comps so you dont have to duplicate layers or duplicate work. It's semi-difficult to fully explain in a post, but trust me, i use many comps within comps all the time. Plus you can create "pre-comps" where AE goes through the legwork of rendering out a complex composition into a video file and then uses the video file like a proxy within your larger comp, thus taking legwork off the machine when you're continuing your design. Motion doesnt do this period. It has a notion called "groups" but it is far from the same thing. So you end up being very inefficient with your workflow in complex projects
Many others above have listed other smaller, but very valid, gripes that the general consensus has with motion. The motion-blur thing ( the element of motion graphics that adds realism by making fast moving object blur when moving from point A to point is a PITA in motion. In AE you can select which layers should be blurred and when you want/don't want to see blurring in your preview separately. In motion, soon as you turn the motion blur on its blurs, every . single. layer. every. single. time. all. the. time. even if you are simply adjust paraments in between previews. Horrendous. and it brings even the beastliest computers to their knees when you use it. GFX card glitches suck when you wait 2 hours for something to render out only to find that one frame is all green with tvnoise snow all over it. There are more, but i digress.
Motion 4 looks promising by adding realism with lights that actually cast shadows and real camera depth of field (both of which AE has had for many versions now) but if i use it and it slows to a crawl mid project for no reason... i'm going to find the install disc and pee on it. and then post that I did that here on this forum so you all can see how crappy motion really is for any real work. (lets hope i dont have to do that... APPLE!!)
I'm actually pretty surprised that this is even news. Shake was discontinued years ago and a good chunk of the team (myself included) have long since moved on. Apple doesn't build products for high end niche markets... the support requirements alone make it uninteresting to them. As for 'Phenomenon', I believe it's hanging out with the Yeti in Area 51...
It's good to have you here and thanks for helping develop one of the best software packages a lot of people have ever used. Do you feel that what you are doing now with Nuke is better than where you were with Shake? Also, how do you view the whole GPU-accelerated workflow vs CPU-only and are there any plans to use OpenCL on your current projects?
Quote:
Originally Posted by aaronsullivan
I still have hope for "Phenomenon"
I think that might have been a case of crossed wires. Mental Images has a product called Phenomena. The Shake team are pretty much out of Apple as Ron said so what will Apple be doing without them? Even if they called it Phenomenon, without the developers who made Shake what it was, it would be anything but phenomenal.
Seriously i cannot remember one time where I have gotten through any project that was HD (and just 720p) where the interface didnt glitch/lock up. And whats worse is that when it glitches, sometimes it doenst crash altogether, sometimes you click on a tab or simple parameter and it just spinwheel-of-deaths for 45 seconds before activating what you just clicked on.
I think to fix this they are going to have to separate the GPU rendering from the interface rendering. The MBP has 2 GPUs and Mac Pro can have many so they should at least reserve one GPU or a portion of it for drawing the interface. They're going to need some protection from crashes too because having the display driver crash forcing a reboot is far from ideal. I don't know why Apple doesn't restart the GPU driver automatically in OS X when this happens.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OhReallyNow
AE also works with this idea of "compositions" being like little nuggets of designs and animations you can create. You can nest those comps within larger comps so you dont have to duplicate layers or duplicate work. It's semi-difficult to fully explain in a post, but trust me, i use many comps within comps all the time. Plus you can create "pre-comps" where AE goes through the legwork of rendering out a complex composition into a video file and then uses the video file like a proxy within your larger comp, thus taking legwork off the machine when you're continuing your design. Motion doesnt do this period. It has a notion called "groups" but it is far from the same thing. So you end up being very inefficient with your workflow in complex projects
Second everything OhReally says about stability. I've always felt that Motion's biggest draw was also it's biggest drawback. The Open GL rendering is glitchy and unstable on all systems - and almost every longer (say over 30 secs) render I've done in Motion has required a re-render to fix broken frames. It's totally random too, as are the crashes. This is one piece of software that requires constant saving.
The plug-ins situation is improving now FCP supports fx plugs. I can now use my Sapphire licence (which costs more than FCS) in FCP and Motion, and Magic Bullet. This is being driven by FCP's near 50% market share in NLEs, however, not by Motion's popularity.
Like other commentators, I WANT to like and use Motion. I also want to see FCS behave like a single set of apps, rather than seperately developed parts, something it has always claimed, but never delivered on properly. I had hoped FCS3 would see a massive and comprehensive rethink as well as re-coding the entire suite to support 64 bit and multiple cores. I think the point upgrade we have been offered is a minor insult all things considered. If it did not mean winding the clock back to 2001 in terms of industry recognition, I'd give PPro a go and stay in Adobe's world - at least they care fully about the pro market. Ironic really.
... I also want to see FCS behave like a single set of apps, rather than seperately developed parts, something it has always claimed, but never delivered on properly. I had hoped FCS3 would see a massive and comprehensive rethink as well as re-coding the entire suite to support 64 bit and multiple cores. I think the point upgrade we have been offered is a minor insult all things considered. ...
Excellent Point. I was really hoping that FCS3 would have just been released with snow leopard to take advantage of grand central / OpenCL / 64 bit etc etc. While I overall love FCS - mainly because of FCP - it doesnt really hold up to being a real unified set of apps. Its starts with the fact that the interface of the apps differs across many of them. FCP is laid out different than motion/soundtrack/DVDSP which is different than Color (which is butt ugly). The integration between the apps is better in certain cases and worse in others so there's no clear order of business regarding how you can treat files and workflows from one app to the next.
One of my biggest issues to date, is the fact that Apple keeps stepping its hardware game up by packing in the latest processors and ram speeds and GFX cards (not really but you get the point) BUT they never seem to update the software to take advantage of all those bells and whistles. I can understand them not bothering to update iLife to support 8 cores in a machine to the max - the likelihood of someone buying a mac pro for anything iLife related is slim. However when you are shelling our over a grand for a software suite, then several grand to have the latest and greatest machine... its somewhat of a slap in the face to not have your computer hardware's potential fully realized - and to know you'll have to wait another 18 months for any substantial updates. Apple has been shipping some beefy mac pros for a while now, fully 64-bit, 8 cores, with the ability to support astronomical amounts of ram ... But $5000 later, when my computer is only using less than 400% (out of 800% [100 per core}) of its total power on any given project, you get the feeling that you something is seriously out of balance. I just wish all the pro apps would use the max processing power and ram all the time, unless i specify otherwise in a preference setting somewhere. Adobe is not in the clear on this matter either as theres no way in hades an 8 core mac pro shouldn't be able to chew through processing some HD video on an AE timeline in full framerate without needing to render... BUT apple gets the harder hand slap because they make the software for their own hardware.
All things considered, FCP is solid. I generally believe in the "if it aint broke dont fix it" mentality... but with almost 2 years in between updates, i think apple should have made it a bit better overall. I just don't like when they pump effort and energy into making specialized tools (like reflections in Motion 4) that the large majority of people will use very seldom. Id rather see them take a fine tooth comb over the entire app and tweak small yet broadly used things (like wtf is with the text generator within FCP? what year is this again?) OR... see them spend 2 years rewriting the entire code in a more efficient manner supporting not the computers they sell now, but machines they will sell a year from now so everything remains lean and zippy.
I'm actually pretty surprised that this is even news. Shake was discontinued years ago and a good chunk of the team (myself included) have long since moved on. Apple doesn't build products for high end niche markets... the support requirements alone make it uninteresting to them. As for 'Phenomenon', I believe it's hanging out with the Yeti in Area 51...
Hey, Ron. Nice of you to comment. I've heard you on Alex Lindsay and Leo Laporte's podcasts before. Welcome.
(Now let's see if we can say anything to lure Leo, Alex or Andy out of "lurker mode" to make some comments now and then.)
Apple has been shipping some beefy mac pros for a while now, fully 64-bit, 8 cores, with the ability to support astronomical amounts of ram ... But $5000 later, when my computer is only using less than 400% (out of 800% [100 per core}) of its total power on any given project, you get the feeling that you something is seriously out of balance.
⌃⌃⌃What he said.
I have wondered about this for years. It just doesn't seem to be a goal of Apple to take FCS to that next level in power. The thing is with HD becoming the norm they really need to step up and bring 64bit and full processor awareness to the game. This might be hard, but surely it would be worth it. Maybe with Snow Leopard some of these things will come to the fore.
Comments
Aw, man. As difficult as Shake was to pick up, it's a ridiculously powerful tool, and I actually enjoyed learning and using it it. I'm kinda sad to see it discontinued.
too true. i haven't used it in a couple/few years, and have forgotten everything i learned i am sure, but i enjoyed it immensely.
Motion is to Shake as GarageBand is to Logic Studio. Does that help in understanding the differences?
AE must have been drastically improved since I last used it, because it has a very steep learning curve. With Motion 3 or 4, it's possible to very quickly get in and out of Motion to complete the task. To someone who has used AE for years, this may be a different story thanks to close familiarity with the program.
You're right - it has dramatically improved. Mostly as a result (I believe) of the competition. AE nowadays (and in fact the entire CS3/4 suite) is unrecognisable from a few ears ago. CS4 Bridge gives a easy and intuitive hub for transferring between apps and browsing material.
Motion IS used by smaller setups, or 'one man bands' in my experience, or to run templates set up by others pros that can be used in FCP - often with content designed on AE ironically. As an aside, AE also does GPU acceleration these days...
However, Motion templates used in FCP are a great example of the borked integration in FCS (like the recently improved round-tripping between FCP and Color) - they work fine, but are so slow to render on a FCP timeline, it's quicker to just render out the gfx in Motion than use the template in FCP. Certainly, much of this looks to be improved in FCS3 (or FCS as it's now called again). AE comps work seemlessly in PPro or Encore. In FCS, there were often issues between apps. Hopefully FCS(2009) improves on this situation.
That is interesting that even they cite no examples of pros using Motion. That's interesting, but not damning evidence. Perhaps the very sophisticated motion graphics work remains AE, and Motion is being used for quick comps? I don't know... Let's hear from more working motion graphics pros.
Chiming in: I am a working motion graphics pro and i could urinate all over the motion install disc and not think twice about it.
The short of it is: Video/design people stick to what that know and what works. After effects is on version 9. Motion only on 4. its been ruling in its sector for over twice as long as motion has even existed, much less been able to do any 3D stuff.
When Motion 3 was released I wanted so badly to like it. I got the new FCS package and vowed to do my next few projects in Motion. For those who do not work in motion graphics let me set the record straight. Motion has a few good things going for it. Nice interface, simplified. Less buttons to click than AE. GFX card accelerated means I can put 4 or 5 HD videos on a timeline randomly in 3D space and have the project still playback and a moderate framerate (note, this is a good thing. AE cannot do this). A lot of the "click and drag-ness" of the rest of Apples UI implementations spill over into Motion and that is cool. Motion has some nifty particle emitters which make it easy to bedazzle your project with. BUT all of that comes crashing to the f*cking ground when the app crashes more than amy winehouse circa 2008. Seriously i cannot remember one time where I have gotten through any project that was HD (and just 720p) where the interface didnt glitch/lock up. And whats worse is that when it glitches, sometimes it doenst crash altogether, sometimes you click on a tab or simple parameter and it just spinwheel-of-deaths for 45 seconds before activating what you just clicked on. When you are used to clicking a UI element ( a down arrow in a scroll bar OR 'File', Edit, View, etc in the menubar) and in less than 4.5 NANOseconds having your click be registered and the UI updated... 45 seconds until response is maddening. This has happened on every computer i have used Motion on from the paltriest macbook that probably shouldnt have even had that app installed on it.. to a mac pro with the most expensive components in it. and everyt computer in between. Stability is FAR from anywhere a pro can use on a regular basis. it just plain sucks in the amount of layers and processes it can handle and it caps out at really too low of a number for any large project.
Also, there is no real plugin support. There are tons of plugin, many of which are extremely powerful and scalable that are available for AE or other apps that simply aren't available for motion. That sucks. The only thing i use motion for .. sometimes.. is lower thirds... and only because you can embed the motion project file into the final cut timeline and have it autoupdate your FCP project whenever you make a change over in motion. nice. but thats all. I have vowed to never use Motion again for a real motion graphic project because i want to punch a baby every time I use it. AE is not 100% stable but it handles large projects with many layers like a champ. AE also works with this idea of "compositions" being like little nuggets of designs and animations you can create. You can nest those comps within larger comps so you dont have to duplicate layers or duplicate work. It's semi-difficult to fully explain in a post, but trust me, i use many comps within comps all the time. Plus you can create "pre-comps" where AE goes through the legwork of rendering out a complex composition into a video file and then uses the video file like a proxy within your larger comp, thus taking legwork off the machine when you're continuing your design. Motion doesnt do this period. It has a notion called "groups" but it is far from the same thing. So you end up being very inefficient with your workflow in complex projects
Many others above have listed other smaller, but very valid, gripes that the general consensus has with motion. The motion-blur thing ( the element of motion graphics that adds realism by making fast moving object blur when moving from point A to point
Motion 4 looks promising by adding realism with lights that actually cast shadows and real camera depth of field (both of which AE has had for many versions now) but if i use it and it slows to a crawl mid project for no reason... i'm going to find the install disc and pee on it. and then post that I did that here on this forum so you all can see how crappy motion really is for any real work. (lets hope i dont have to do that... APPLE!!
I'm actually pretty surprised that this is even news. Shake was discontinued years ago and a good chunk of the team (myself included) have long since moved on. Apple doesn't build products for high end niche markets... the support requirements alone make it uninteresting to them. As for 'Phenomenon', I believe it's hanging out with the Yeti in Area 51...
It's good to have you here and thanks for helping develop one of the best software packages a lot of people have ever used. Do you feel that what you are doing now with Nuke is better than where you were with Shake? Also, how do you view the whole GPU-accelerated workflow vs CPU-only and are there any plans to use OpenCL on your current projects?
I still have hope for "Phenomenon"
I think that might have been a case of crossed wires. Mental Images has a product called Phenomena. The Shake team are pretty much out of Apple as Ron said so what will Apple be doing without them? Even if they called it Phenomenon, without the developers who made Shake what it was, it would be anything but phenomenal.
Seriously i cannot remember one time where I have gotten through any project that was HD (and just 720p) where the interface didnt glitch/lock up. And whats worse is that when it glitches, sometimes it doenst crash altogether, sometimes you click on a tab or simple parameter and it just spinwheel-of-deaths for 45 seconds before activating what you just clicked on.
I think to fix this they are going to have to separate the GPU rendering from the interface rendering. The MBP has 2 GPUs and Mac Pro can have many so they should at least reserve one GPU or a portion of it for drawing the interface. They're going to need some protection from crashes too because having the display driver crash forcing a reboot is far from ideal. I don't know why Apple doesn't restart the GPU driver automatically in OS X when this happens.
AE also works with this idea of "compositions" being like little nuggets of designs and animations you can create. You can nest those comps within larger comps so you dont have to duplicate layers or duplicate work. It's semi-difficult to fully explain in a post, but trust me, i use many comps within comps all the time. Plus you can create "pre-comps" where AE goes through the legwork of rendering out a complex composition into a video file and then uses the video file like a proxy within your larger comp, thus taking legwork off the machine when you're continuing your design. Motion doesnt do this period. It has a notion called "groups" but it is far from the same thing. So you end up being very inefficient with your workflow in complex projects
It doesn't look like they've done this either:
http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/...ew.html#motion
But hey, they found time to do multi-touch support as if anybody needs that in a compositor.
The plug-ins situation is improving now FCP supports fx plugs. I can now use my Sapphire licence (which costs more than FCS) in FCP and Motion, and Magic Bullet. This is being driven by FCP's near 50% market share in NLEs, however, not by Motion's popularity.
Like other commentators, I WANT to like and use Motion. I also want to see FCS behave like a single set of apps, rather than seperately developed parts, something it has always claimed, but never delivered on properly. I had hoped FCS3 would see a massive and comprehensive rethink as well as re-coding the entire suite to support 64 bit and multiple cores. I think the point upgrade we have been offered is a minor insult all things considered. If it did not mean winding the clock back to 2001 in terms of industry recognition, I'd give PPro a go and stay in Adobe's world - at least they care fully about the pro market. Ironic really.
... I also want to see FCS behave like a single set of apps, rather than seperately developed parts, something it has always claimed, but never delivered on properly. I had hoped FCS3 would see a massive and comprehensive rethink as well as re-coding the entire suite to support 64 bit and multiple cores. I think the point upgrade we have been offered is a minor insult all things considered. ...
Excellent Point. I was really hoping that FCS3 would have just been released with snow leopard to take advantage of grand central / OpenCL / 64 bit etc etc. While I overall love FCS - mainly because of FCP - it doesnt really hold up to being a real unified set of apps. Its starts with the fact that the interface of the apps differs across many of them. FCP is laid out different than motion/soundtrack/DVDSP which is different than Color (which is butt ugly). The integration between the apps is better in certain cases and worse in others so there's no clear order of business regarding how you can treat files and workflows from one app to the next.
One of my biggest issues to date, is the fact that Apple keeps stepping its hardware game up by packing in the latest processors and ram speeds and GFX cards (not really but you get the point) BUT they never seem to update the software to take advantage of all those bells and whistles. I can understand them not bothering to update iLife to support 8 cores in a machine to the max - the likelihood of someone buying a mac pro for anything iLife related is slim. However when you are shelling our over a grand for a software suite, then several grand to have the latest and greatest machine... its somewhat of a slap in the face to not have your computer hardware's potential fully realized - and to know you'll have to wait another 18 months for any substantial updates. Apple has been shipping some beefy mac pros for a while now, fully 64-bit, 8 cores, with the ability to support astronomical amounts of ram ... But $5000 later, when my computer is only using less than 400% (out of 800% [100 per core}) of its total power on any given project, you get the feeling that you something is seriously out of balance. I just wish all the pro apps would use the max processing power and ram all the time, unless i specify otherwise in a preference setting somewhere. Adobe is not in the clear on this matter either as theres no way in hades an 8 core mac pro shouldn't be able to chew through processing some HD video on an AE timeline in full framerate without needing to render... BUT apple gets the harder hand slap because they make the software for their own hardware.
All things considered, FCP is solid. I generally believe in the "if it aint broke dont fix it" mentality... but with almost 2 years in between updates, i think apple should have made it a bit better overall. I just don't like when they pump effort and energy into making specialized tools (like reflections in Motion 4) that the large majority of people will use very seldom. Id rather see them take a fine tooth comb over the entire app and tweak small yet broadly used things (like wtf is with the text generator within FCP? what year is this again?) OR... see them spend 2 years rewriting the entire code in a more efficient manner supporting not the computers they sell now, but machines they will sell a year from now so everything remains lean and zippy.
here's to hoping.
I'm actually pretty surprised that this is even news. Shake was discontinued years ago and a good chunk of the team (myself included) have long since moved on. Apple doesn't build products for high end niche markets... the support requirements alone make it uninteresting to them. As for 'Phenomenon', I believe it's hanging out with the Yeti in Area 51...
Hey, Ron. Nice of you to comment. I've heard you on Alex Lindsay and Leo Laporte's podcasts before. Welcome.
(Now let's see if we can say anything to lure Leo, Alex or Andy out of "lurker mode" to make some comments now and then.)
Apple has been shipping some beefy mac pros for a while now, fully 64-bit, 8 cores, with the ability to support astronomical amounts of ram ... But $5000 later, when my computer is only using less than 400% (out of 800% [100 per core}) of its total power on any given project, you get the feeling that you something is seriously out of balance.
⌃⌃⌃What he said.
I have wondered about this for years. It just doesn't seem to be a goal of Apple to take FCS to that next level in power. The thing is with HD becoming the norm they really need to step up and bring 64bit and full processor awareness to the game. This might be hard, but surely it would be worth it. Maybe with Snow Leopard some of these things will come to the fore.