Is Apple Motion dead??? How about now?

Hi

It's a question that is asked in one way or another on a regular basis in almost every forum and user group I participate in. I think the answer is all relative to the user. I got on board with Motion with the first version of Motion 5. I came to understand that those who were with Motion from the beginning would have a very different point of view from mine, because ..and in relation to shake...the potential from that horizon is not anywhere close to the current version.

For me though, in my experience, I have seen Motion improve steadily in the time that I have used it. I make template based plugins for a living, and this has become easier and easier over time, with many improvements that allow me to do more that I could not do before and do it faster. But, in that time, I definitely have seen no new particle systems, still no way to animate the outlines of text, and often, as with the border filter, overshoot behavior and align to behavior, the new tools lack enough features to make them really useful.

I think the link behavior has seen the most improvement.

Motion tracking as been a significant update, even though it was very overdue.

The 3rd party developers who make actual plugins, mVFX, Boris and Yanobox have elevated Motion far more than Apple has done directly. I often hear that this is Apples position, ..they provide an inexpensive and fast platform that developers can enhance with their own tools.

Meanwhile, macOS 11 has opened the flood gates for developers. We are just beginning to see the next generation of 3rd party plugins trickle in. YanoBox Motype for example.

One of my peers last month, demonstrated an effect that maps body movement and produced a nice particle effects that responded to the area of the body. This was possible with the new developer tools in macOS 11.

I personally don't feel that Motion is dead. As far as I have come to understand, as long as Apple is committed to the development of FCP, then that commitment extends to Motion. My wish list for new features and tools is likely to be different to the next user. I'm waiting to see what is going to be possible for small independent developers like myself with access to the market for iPad plugins..that's my main concern at the moment.

The Mac OS interface (Finder) is almost 40 years old. Hasn't really changed all that much from System 1.0. How dead is Mac OS?

I'm fairly sure that those who think Motion is dead have only reached a "dead end" in their progress using the application. These days, everybody wants applications to be able to do everything for them... Nobody wants to take the time to learn, discover, experiment. Betcha can't wait for AI to do all the work for you.

Have any idea what you can do with the Oscillate behavior? (Besides just use it to oscillate things...) How about accessing sine and cosine information in real time to apply to animations? Like the little orange dot oscillating in "front of" the arrow as it rotates...

For those who know how to use it, Motion is an *integral* part of Final Cut Pro. Not an add-on. Not for round-tripping. For building or customizing just about any (graphic) part of Final Cut Pro in a kind of "workshop" environment. The genius of Motion is that it can also stand on its own. Also, if you don't want to deal with it, you don't have to.

(3D Text in Motion... and, of course, FCPX)

I still don't know everything *I* can do with it, so Motion is not dead to me, yet. And I agree with Rowie about 3rd party developers being allowed into the "ecosystem" of Final Cut without having to be external to the app. Round-tripping is a thing of the past!

Motion is a general purpose tool that everybody who understands Final Cut has a chance of using to enhance their own "artwork" in their own way. It's affordable. How fancy does it need to be? Most of its strength is in its relative simplicity.

Yes, there was a lot of hype about things from Shake finding their way into Motion. The little that did was super watered down in Motion. Motion has been stagnant for over a decade, no real development, just enough to keep it breathing. But it and FCPX lack so much. The dev teams are simply spending too much time on iPhones.

The pro apps at Apple are getting pretty stagnant, I see that clearly. Apologist will make excuses for it. But why should I spend 10x the amount of the app on third party plugins to make it work like its competition? That negates the argument that the pro apps are really cheap and have no recurring costs. Next to nothing of real significance has come to any of the pro apps in a long time. Not holding my breath. As for Fox's comment about macOS interface, the desktop hasn't changed on any OS much in many years, and they all look the same now, I find that argument off-base and misleading, apples to onions.