Motion 4: Canvas Not Displaying Properly.

Question

Level 1

20 points

Motion 4: Canvas Not Displaying Properly.

Hi all,

I'm having a terrible time with Motion 4 since I upgraded from the prior version. On my Mac Pro with a Radeon 4870, all of my projects display in black and white or distorted colors. See here:

http://www.lonseidman.com/motion.png

I have tried everything. The canvas is set to display "color," I tried alternating through all of the available display options. Nothing changes. I reinstalled motion completely, deleted preferences and still no change. Even tried changing screen resolution mid-stream to see if that might fix things.

Is it possible this is a 4870 issue? Anyone else having difficulty?

Mac Pro 3.0ghz/12 GB RAM/1024MB 4870, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Nov 7, 2009 1:45 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 7, 2009 3:05 PM in response to Lon Seidman

Looks like a graphics card issue to me - do you have another one you can swap in to test?

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Answer 2

Lon Seidman Author

Level 1

20 points

Nov 8, 2009 8:18 AM in response to Mark Spencer4

Mark,

Thanks for the reply. I'm a huge fan of your work and learned motion from one of your tutorials.

I do have another video card.. I'll try to swap in my old 1900XT later this evening later tonight when I wrap up the project I'm working on. I have a feeling my upgrade to the 4870 is the issue, wonder if it's the OS X driver on Snow Leopard? Unfortunately Motion is the only app giving me headaches, everything else seems to work fine -- including when the motion projects are dropped into the Final Cut Studio timeline.

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Answer 3

Nov 11, 2009 1:48 AM in response to Lon Seidman

Are you sure you don't have high contrast turned on in "universal access"?

Patrick

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Answer 4

Nov 23, 2009 8:42 PM in response to Lon Seidman

I'm having the same problem with with a Radeon HD 3870. It worked fine with Motion 3. I also can't get the Motion templates to display properly either. I've run out of ideas and don't know how to proceed to solve this issue. I checked the contrast setting and it's set at normal. I haven't noticed any problems with the other FCS programs.

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Answer 5

Lon Seidman Author

Level 1

20 points

Nov 24, 2009 4:35 AM in response to Richard Palfreyman

I am glad I am not the only one with this problem. I have tried everything suggested above (short of swapping out the card). I think it's definitely some kind of driver issue involving snow leopard and the newer ATI cards. I'm forced to do my Motion work on my Macbook Pro for now.

Apple please help!

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Answer 6

dblue

Level 1

9 points

Nov 27, 2009 9:17 PM in response to Lon Seidman

Thanks for posting this. I'm having the same issue. Same set up as you except less RAM.

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Answer 7

dblue

Level 1

9 points

Nov 28, 2009 12:09 PM in response to dblue

Have your calibrated your monitor? If so, I think we found the problem:

Just got off the phone with Apple Care. Jason and I probed for about an hour and he found the culprit. The color profile on my cinema display. Try changing your profile back to the default one -- now the canvas works fine. When I switch it back to the one I created with Colormunki, it goes back to the blacking everything out.

For others who may see this, to change your color profile back go to System Prefs --> Displays --> Color. I set mine back to LED Cinema Display and it worked fine.

Thanks again Jason.

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Answer 8

Lon Seidman Author

Level 1

20 points

Nov 28, 2009 5:44 PM in response to dblue

That did the trick! The Color Munki is to blame, reverting back to a different profile PRIOR to loading Motion will correct the issue.

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Answer 9

Dec 1, 2009 9:05 PM in response to dblue

dblue:

Thanks for your post and time in solving this problem. I too was using a Colormunki profile. I went back to the default apple cinema display and that took care of it.

Thanks again!

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Answer 10

Dec 9, 2009 3:07 PM in response to Lon Seidman

I was using color munki also and that was the problem. I need to keep my photography and video lives better separated.

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Answer 11

Mar 4, 2010 3:56 PM in response to Lon Seidman

I have the same issue. In Motion 4 the canvas has become unusable since I've switched to profiling the screens with ColorMunki. Given the price of the ColorMunki I find it hard to accept that I should switch back to using an inferior profile just because Motion has an issue with what x-rite produced here in terms of profiles.

Given the fact that the canvas in Final Cut Pro works just fine with the ColorMunki profiles, I assume it's an issue with Motion.

But to be honest, I don't really care if it's x-rite's fault because their product creates bad profiles, or if it's Apple's fault because their software has a bug. I want to be able to work in a proper fashion without having to manually switch back and forth between profiles just to be able to use Motion.

Apple, x-rite, could you please get on the phone and fix this?

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Answer 12

Mar 4, 2010 4:17 PM in response to Chris Marquardt

Yeah, we've seen lots of posts about Color Munki and Motion not playing well together

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Answer 13

Skyking

Level 2

459 points

Jun 2, 2010 3:29 PM in response to Mark Spencer4

I want to thank you all for these posts!! I started having the same problem but didn't think it would be the color profile generated by the Colormunki. Once I set the profile back to Cinema Display Motion worked great again. For now I am going back to using my Eye One profiler. I never had an issue with that. I'll continue to use the Colormunki to profile my printers. I hope X-Rite can fix the issue! It is a great piece of equipment.

Sky....

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Answer 14

Skyking

Level 2

459 points

Jun 2, 2010 3:57 PM in response to Skyking

Also...I did some checking on the X-Rite site and they recommended the following:

The initial releases of Apple's Snow Leopard operating system, versions OSX10.6 and OSX 10.6.1, do not support ICC version 4 profiles. For this reason we are only recommending that users build version 2 profiles.

Our ColorMunki products default to version 4 profiles. To change this, click on ColorMunki Photo in your menu bar, then click on preferences. Here you can change version 4 to version 2.

Apple has recognized that they have an issue with the new version of ColorSync in 10.6.X OS. They are working on the issue and will correct it with a Software Update.

I did this and Motion still worked!!

Sky....

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