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Thread: New Apple fx creation tool

  1. #1

    New Apple fx creation tool

    http://www.apple.com/motion/

    Apple seems to have just introduced a very useful tool for creating stuff.

    No point in duplicating all this will hundreds of dmx channels.

    Available 'in the summer'.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Mar 2004
    Location
    Stockholm
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    54
    Quote Originally Posted by samsc
    http://www.apple.com/motion/

    Apple seems to have just introduced a very useful tool for creating stuff.

    No point in duplicating all this will hundreds of dmx channels.

    Available 'in the summer'.
    And 299$ as price! Hopefully a creative tool for a low price.
    Not anybody will spend a fortune on AE ,Combustion etc.
    Will be very,very interesting to put my fingers on that software.

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by peppe
    And 299$ as price! Hopefully a creative tool for a low price.
    Not anybody will spend a fortune on AE ,Combustion etc.
    Will be very,very interesting to put my fingers on that software.
    I have just put my fingers on that software and it is just as I thought is was going to be - The Livetype of motion graphics. It is awesome, intuitive, easy or complex, and real time. It does rival AE for many reasons - Price, ease of use, intuitive GUI, and just plain fun but the new AE 6.5 has many more features that kick motion into a different class of software. For creating quick 2d motion graphics Motion is very cool and defintately a coup de gras towards Adobe. Apple's official respose to everytime someone would ask about why they are going after AE was, and I quote "Motion isn't meant to compete with AE but is meant to be just another tool to be used hand in hand with AE". Yeah right, I'm sure that Adobe going after Apple's Shake for excellent compositing tools prompted this as Shake has just had a major improvement (3.5 Real Warping and Morphing and near real time timeline with no need to rerender small effects for only $2999 - nearly half the 3.0 price) - But then again so has AE (6.5 with many improvements, including designer scripts that it ships with 300 just for text, auto color correction, auto level correction and many more).

    Some of the coolest features I thought about Motion were:

    Real time creation, allowing you to just throw on layer after layer of real time effects, type, video, and adjustments in real time while the loop is playing. I believe that it uses the same sort of referencing code that flash does with regard to multiple instances of the same object because they were throwing on rediculous amounts of layers, using movies as particles in the partical generator, without slowing it down.

    Gestures, with a Wacom Tablet, which BTW is used frequently in Motion, you can just throw a Layer in a particular direction with as much or little force as you want and it will start traveiling in that direction, no keyframes needed. You can assign an attractor to a layer and choose the strength, force, distance of follow, whether the following objects collide into the end of the canvas or past it, and several other parameters. You can just sketch a motion for your objects and they will follow them, no keyframes - You can do motion sketching in AE too though but not as easily.

    Partical Effects - Generic partical effects always look that way to me - generic, With motion, you can do some amazing things with the Partical effects such as use a movie or any other piece of content as a partical, you can then adjust several options such as strength, constraints, and many more to form the partical flow - where or how far you want it to go. One of the coolest things I've seen done with partical effect was using a photo sequece of cars as the partical and constraining it to a purly horizontal axis, then applying a fade in fade out gesture to it. This would make a picture of each car fade in while moving accross the screen then fade out while the next one from another direction would come in.

    I give Apple's Motion 4.5 out 5 stars for its *just do it* approach to producing some amazing resuts very quickly, its intuitive interface, its scaleable learning curve, and its price. It's going to be a huge hit. I think that for most seasoned AE users, it will be another tool to be used hand in hand, but for the unseasoned or those that have avoided AE's complexity altogether (a very large piece of the pie), Apple's Motion will be the answer.

    Now, if only there was a moving lights console based entirely on Apple's Motion's technology life would be good.

    Christian Choi
    Last edited by litemover; 25-04-2004 at 08:58 PM. Reason: forgot to put Vegemite on my toast

  4. #4
    All the features included in motion can be programmed into a server using QC. There are a bunch of Java scripts that you can use to do things to video input also around the web. Things like the ah ha video look, sketchy video input.

    I've been playing with QC and have come up with a simple server that mimics most of what motion can do. It just takes 128 channels and a DMX to MIDI box to run it.

    Christian

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