Motion 5 or After Effects?

I have been practicing with AfterEffects the last couple of months and can tell you that AE can do many more advance things than Motion can but for simple ease of use AE *****. What may take Motion 1or2 steps is 5to10 in AE and you can not simply figure it out by clicking around. You literally have to search online for example on how to create stroked line and then make grow.

AE's whole PreCompositing workflow is an F'ing joke of a way to do things. It is not a fast way to work and just makes things way more difficult then needs to be and takes a lot longer to create simple animations or compositions.

And AE's audio playback is ridiculous. There's two ways to do it if you just want to hear audio you hit the period key but if you want to hear audio and see your video play at the same time you hit the zero key once to preRender and then you hit it again to actually play the video with the audio ***! In Motion you hit the spacebar and that's it.

And then there is this whole Color Solid thing which I can't stand.

Its shortcut keys are handy to expand only the parameters you need to see then hit the same key again and it hides away keeping your timeline clean.

So in a nutshell thats what it takes to work with AE.

Basically in Motion you can get everyday basic things done so much faster then AE ever could no matter how fast you are at it.

I have been using Motion since it came out and also have Motion 5 and there are things I definetly don't like about it but have never experienced the issues you are haveing so often. What is details of your computer specs?

If you don't have proper RAM and enough of it this can cause the problems you are having.

I've yet to find anything AE does that I can't do in Motion easier and faster.

I have been envolved in motion graphic for 2 yers and approached to apple motion, what i miss in motion is the not easy interoperability with PS and AI, and i getting tired to experience same issue of ACE001. program freezes and crashes many times, and on same computer it does not happen with AE.

Can you tell if there a real powerful script that allow me to send shapes and lines for illustrator? I am using this at the moment ( http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22151802/Export%20as%20Motion%20shape.js), and do you think a orject like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4nOxvCqpPY&feature=endscreen can be done easely with MOTION ?

hi,

actually that could be done in Motion I reckon. Mind you I'm looking forward to starting Smoking later in the year.

a

i have both motion 5 and AE CS5 and tbh i have never looked @ motion yet......

i love AE but tbh the most i use it for is to do a little green screen and some simple comp stuff!

i would like to learn some motion, but my question is, if i am adding some effects here and there (gun shots, blood hits etc) need some masks and a little green screen work, motion 5 should be fine right?

Only thing AE has over Motion is some more refined Rotoscope tools. Motion is easier to learn and use. It has a far superior playback and render engine.

I'm going to guess it's a hardware configuration issue. What is your hardware configureation?

I work with Motion daily, have since version 1, and build projects as long as 5 minutes with 100+ object layers (not counting behavior/filter layers). I find it very stable. I'm running a 2008 Mac Pro vie internal SATA drive with 16GB RAM and an HD 4870 GPU. Runs just fine. And I get my work out in a fraction of the time I could with AE.

Thanks for your reply, I have been envolved in video and motion graphic3 years ago, my computer is a MBP july 2009, vram 256 mb, 8 gb ram, and so I have a lot of difficulties managing complicate projects.

I studied final cut and motion deeply and approched to after effects to understand limits and advantages of both,

probalbly AE being older has much more plug in, I love optical flares plug in (lens flares).
what about integration with 3d software? I am studyng CINEMA 4D, I heard it integrates better with AE

i guess i will use both motion and AE 🙂 both have plus and minus points but both excellent applications!

I would have to agree, but Im hoping Motion will eventually have something similar to AE's ease with masks. Painting masks in AE is like making selections in PS, which is awesome for the Rotoscoping and lots of effects I'm currently building. Forced to work back and forth between the two products, but on a day-to-day basis I will hit the Motion Icon far more times than the AE.

I love working with groups inside of Motion, they are kind of like a pre-comp in After Effects but much more flexible. Working with a pre-comp in After Effects is a nightmare. When working in Motion the fact that I can group related items together to simply a more complex project is great. No need to switch between comps to change something. This is a strong point with Motion and After Effects could really benefit from this.

One thing that is missing is expressions. Yes there are some things you can do without using expressions but they can really simply your workflow and often reduce the number of key frames or key frames all together. I really would be lost without using expressions.

The only real negative with Motion is only one project can be open at a time. Same thing with After Effects with the difference being multiple comps in a single project. A project in Motion is your comp, so this really does not help with a more complex project.

I do like the interface, much easier and efficient to navigate. For simple things Motion is going to be a better choice. Prefer to use After Effects for more complex projects. On occasion I use both. I can create a really nice background with little effort in Motion then ship it off to After Effects for the more complex projects. I think it comes down to workflow preference and the project.

I really do like Motion and I do not consider it a toy. Motion has potential and would love to see it have more advanced features.

I'm a 3D animator and special effects artist.

If you're serious about doing any CGI fx then forget about Motion. It's great for animated text and simple things like that but it really shouldn't be compared to software like After Effects or Smoke - it's just not in the same league.

Have a look at this website that features After Effects tutorials for special effects. Then try and mimick any of these techniques in Motion and you'll begin to see what I'm talking about.

www_videocopilot_net

B

FX Bear wrote:

The only real negative with Motion is only one project can be open at a time.

This is no longer true - this was changed in 5.0.5.

You can certainly have more than one project open now. And very useful it is too for copying and pasting between different projects.

bob_walmsley wrote:

Have a look at this website that features After Effects tutorials for special effects. Then try and mimick any of these techniques in Motion and you'll begin to see what I'm talking about.

www_videocopilot_net

B

Here is a videocoilot tutorial:

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/translucent_glass/

And here's a tutorial for the exact same thing done in Motion:

http://youtu.be/SSt6IbDyf9E

Here's another Motion tutorial that shows how to do a fairly complex welding sparks effect:

http://youtu.be/scbXhiZy8uA

And here's one from videcopilot along the same lines:

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_sparks_title/

No-one would deny that there are things that Ae can do that Motion simply can't, but to suggest that Motion is only good for is animated text is really to overstate the case.

I didn't say it was only good for animating text. I said it was great for doing simple things - text animation being one of them. The ice example is a simple text animation. The sparks are simple particle animations. This is all very basic stuff that, admittedly, Motion does quite well. It's amazing value for money and a great piece of software if taken at face value. It's shortcomings are only apparent when it's compared to proper compositing tools like Nuke or AfterEffects (which it shouldn't be).