Motion 5 - Audio generated FX

simmer209 wrote:

I have several items that I want to react to my audio file which is an hour+ long in length. Am I understanding wrong that I need to attach my audio to each individual item in order for it to react to the audio file? The problem is it is taking 6 hours for Motion to analyze the audio for one item!!! I might not be using a top of the line Mac Pro, but I have a maxed spec Retina iMac.

First of all: OUCH! Working with audio is going to cost you (time). You might be better off breaking down your audio behaviors into "chunks" — individual audio behaviors every 5 minutes or so (plan for gaps in the audio) for any given parameter — but before you resort to this, read on...

I am hoping I am understanding this incorrectly and that there is just one location to insert this audio that is analyzed once, and then all items I need to react to audio can be pointed to that already analyzed audio file.

Yes - you need to have the audio analyzed ONCE. You also need to let the Mac *finish* analyzing before moving on to something else — interrupting the process will halt keyframe production at the point of interruption. Once you do that you can actually option-drag duplicates to other objects (or even duplicate it for the same object.) Then use the Apply To drop down to assign that audio behavior to *another* parameter.

Also, once an item is finally analyzed to my audio file, any changes to that item (such as moving its layer position, adjusting some animation sliders, etc.) is causing Motion 20-40 minutes to process the slightest change, making it impossible to work with.

Yeah... this is a bummer as all the keyframes that the behavior produces must be updated... The way around this is to add a Behaviors > Parameter > Custom Behavior to the object. Add Parameter the value you need to adjust and use the Custom to adjust the offsets — Motion, in general, will process these offsets in "real time". If all you need to do is adjust "amplitude", adjust the Audio Behavior Scale parameter (adjusting this does not usually cause recalc'ing all the analyzed keyframes).

When working with audio, you need a plan. If you're just experimenting, only use about a minute of audio material and figure out what you want for your end result. This includes setting Frequency Ranges as you should have these figured out before you try to apply to specific objects for analyzing AND the Smoothness (and Peaks) option. Better yet: if you can separate each instrument (or subsets of instruments) into individual discrete files (easy to do with MIDI sequences, not so much with mixes.) The overall end effect is much better. [Using Left or Right Channel options is also effective.] As I said: have a plan — keep notes! Once you have a plan in place, then you can change your audio — re-analyze your "key" audio behaviors and option drag duplicates to the other objects that will share the effect. If necessary, and you have natural gaps, you can subdivide the "tracks" with more than one, shorter, audio behavior. You will still be able to duplicate these across multiple objects.

It will still take you some time...

HTH

When you make a change that initiates the Analysis again, you should simply wait it out. All you should get is this wait cursor in the Audio behavior inspector:

If you get a "beach ball" — that's probably the OS complaining. It might be resources being used/rewritten on your hard disk. I don't know exactly what you mean by a "maxed out" retina iMac. Is that with an SSD? ...and how much RAM (16GB or more?).

You can do some resource management in Motion and try increasing the amount of memory allocated to Motion from 80% (default) to up to about 95% (you can try higher if you like...I tend to leave a little breathing room for the OS in there). I don't think it will make a significant amount of difference but it might keep more computer resource operations concentrated in Motion and not so many other processes. The other thing you can try is changing your Autosave preference from Save a copy every: 15 minutes to 60 minutes or more and give Motion a chance to finish analyzing your audio files before making a backup. Also, set the Autosave Vault Folder to a location on your fastest drive — or turn it off altogether if you never use it (*not* recommended!) Other than that, I can't think of too much else to tell you. If you get the "spinning beachball of death" — try waiting a few minutes without trying to do anything to see if it comes out of it by itself. If your project is very "busy" (a lot of different objects doing a lot of different things — especially emitters or replicators) try turning most of them off except the one (or two) you are working on at the moment, or reducing the loads they create (e.g., if you have a high birth rate on an emitter, bring it down to under 100 and shortening the Life of the particles, etc... stuff like that). A project that is an hour long is a massive load on Motion. Is there any way you can reduce the project into "scenes" or "acts", export those sections as video and put all the pieces together in FCPX or even Motion as video clips?

Right now, I've got a 2017 i5 4GB Radeon Pro 570 24GB RAM — also a fusion drive — a pretty basic 27in iMac [5k retina] to which I added an extra 8GB RAM. It's actually a little slower than the 2013 i7 4GB NVIDIA 780m that died unexpectedly [I think playing Diablo III at high resolution overheated it and toasted the GPU]. It's slower because I have several external SSD drives that helped its performance and that i7 with hyperthreading makes a rather big difference... This newer iMac struggles a little with processor intensive tasks (comparatively speaking).

OT:

The thing about it that irks me the most is that as a 2013, I had already been planning that an upgrade would be needed for a 2018/2019 model. As it is, I was forced to replace the older equipment when I was not quite ready to do so. I had to replace the old one with the "best deal I could find"... that day. There's a few things I like about this (2017 5K retina), but overall, there really is no "overall" performance boost that I would expect from a newer machine.

... also ... I don't dare play the game full screen on this one... LOL. So far... I don't seem to really push the heat generation (I haven't heard any fans) playing this way.

PS - are you also guessguy209 on YouTube?