Review: Apple Motion 4

In Apple Motion 4, parameter panels are easier to navigate, as is the moveable pop-up, semi-transparent heads-up-display interface—which adapts to whichever tool you have just selected.

Apple Motion—now in version 4 as part of the new Final Cut Studio suite—boasts major advances in the areas of text, camera framing, depth of field, 3D shadows and reflections, credit rolls, and link parameter options. As Motion continues to be refined, the comparisons with Adobe After Effects (AE) become more and more inescapable.

As the program gains in feature set and sophistication, how does that affect its vaunted intuitiveness? After all, Motion has become the go-to tool for pros who want to get a 3D animation project up and running quickly, and with a minimal learning curve. While AE''s interface keeps you twirling out layers in your continually scrolling timeline in order to make adjustments, Motion moves the toolset up and to the left of the main window. In Motion 4, parameter panels are easier to navigate, as is the moveable pop-up, semi-transparent heads-up-display (HUD) interface—which adapts to whichever tool you have just selected.

Motion has been built from the ground up to be a realtime construction tool with realtime playback. In recent years, After Effects—with its OpenGL options—has caught up with it. This new version of Motion probably will not get anyone to give up AE, but it does offer some powerful new tools that seem ready to please higher-end motion-graphics artists who needed more from the feature set of the last version.

Parameter linking allows you to link animated elements to each other. For example, say you have a propeller plane flying through 3D space. You could animate the propellers separately to make them spin while they are connected to the plane, which is moving. Previous versions of Motion made this a perilous keyframing nightmare. Motion 4 does it automatically by linking animations, avoiding the need for keyframing calisthenics by calculating the speed, alignment, and movement automagically.

Motion 4 now officially has a depth-of-field command. In previous versions, simulating depth of field was a troublesome task. You had to blur objects or entire scene segments separately as a cheat. It worked in a pinch, but as soon as you moved the camera, the deal was off because you had to recalibrate everything to incorporate movement. Now it''s easy. Just set your focal point—that part of the scene you want in focus. You can actually just pick an object and with one click, keep that part in focus and bathe everything else in a soft blur. Pull rack focus effects by assigning multiple focus parameters to many objects. One of the coolest new additions is a focus camera behavior. You basically lock focus to a single object or element in your scene, then animate objects and the camera while the zone of focus stays on just what you preselect.

The program finally includes 3D reflections and shadows. Motion has long enabled creation in true 3D space (along with providing 3D object volume depth in areas such as particle emitters), but reflections and shadows in the previous versions had to be fudged. That is, you could simulate them, but it was a laborious process. 3D reflections, as you might imagine, make for very realistic effects, and the reflections offer a lot of control. Take the example of text sitting on a flat plane. You can turn on 3D reflections, and the floor will reflect as if it were a mirror or pane of glass. You can adjust the blur of the reflection to work toward a sense of realism and even simulate reflection falloff. Typically, a reflected image tapers off as the reflection extends, so if you were to look at the reflection of text on a floor plane, you would see the bottom of the text as sharper. The top would be a bit less sharp and more blurred. A falloff parameter allows you to set how falloff is displayed. You might usually set it so that the reflection begins to disappear around the halfway mark. An exponent option allows you to move the midpoint of the falloff. Imagine that the falloff reflection is a gradient blend. The exponent option would allow you to shift the bend interactively.

Motion 4 now offers object linking and depth of field (DOF), as shown here. Animations can be linked to other animations, enabling them to move independently and yet remain in sync. Set DOF so the main object stays in focus, while background elements blur as they move away.

You can also set objects to cast reflection or not cast reflection. The problem arises when you start to have objects reflecting off other reflecting objects; this can cause a performance hit. Unlike a 3D program in which you work mostly in shaded vertices or wireframe, Motion is designed to work in realtime at full resolution. The key to optimal performance is using 3D sparingly.

The new 3D shadows are pretty easy to add. Just include a light source and toggle it as a shadow-casting light. You can move the light around and see the shadows cast and move in realtime. Motion 4 offers a lot of flexibility, in that you can set any object to be a shadow caster or shadow receiver. Also new are options to color the shadow as well as to adjust the edge softness.

Scrolling credits are now much easier in Motion 4. You can import text and animate it as a credit roll in a single step. Change the speed, direction, and adaptive spacing, and smooth out the movement to reduce flicker. The addition of a scroll navigator makes it amazingly easy to move quickly to specific points in your credit sequence. Just drag the magnifying box and hop to any point in your text.

Camera framing is a new behavior. Just add it to your scene and set any object to be the center point. The camera locks to the object no matter where or how you alter the scene. Daisy-chain multiple camera locks to assemble high-powered camera-swaying intros quickly and easily.

The new Adjust Glyph tool allows character alterations to quite a granular level. Select any letter anywhere in your scene and independently scale, move, rotate, or adjust that letter. You can now separately control each and every letter in 3D space. There are also four new text generators in this version of Motion, including options for countdown sequences, time and date, and timecode. In addition, a file generator lets you rapidly animate multiple lines of text pulled from a text file.

Motion 4 came via FedEx while I was quite literally in the middle of a Motion 3 project. I was creating an intro sequence for a new video podcast that I''m producing about career development for media artists, titled Media Artist Secrets. I had assembled the rough outlines in Motion 3, but I installed Motion 4 and continued on. I wanted the intro to incorporate a lot of movement of inspirational text elements, and I wanted to tweak it so that groups of text all moved in unison. Symmetric words of encouragement were crucial to get across the messages of building and development.
I worked with Motion 4''s parameter linking behavior and found it fairly easy to track one moving element to another. That way, I did not have to move all the pieces individually. Initially, I went a bit crazy adding reflections and shadows. I discovered that because I had lit the scene from a few different angles, and because objects are set to cast, absorb, and reflect by default, the extra eye candy suddenly hit where it hurts—in realtime-preview frame rate. I was able to turn off motion blurring and throttle down to draft quality for realtime playback, but it illuminated for me the difference between Motion and a classic 3D program. The 3D programs I work with often show rough previews, whereas in Motion, I work most of the time in full HD resolution. If you intend to employ a lot of the snazzy new 3D options in the way of shadows and reflections, be prepared to scale down preview quality a bit when you pile on too much.

I use an eight-core Mac Pro with 20GB of RAM, so 99 percent of the time things went pretty smoothly. The intro also included several video clips, and I was able to coat them with slight reflections and shadows to give them some pop, making the video clips move a little more vibrantly as they spun into the scene.

I have since used Motion 4 on other projects, and the program continues to be a joy to use. I can''t say this is a particularly feature-packed update for me, but it does offer a lot of smaller options in the way of improvements to text and object linking.

For many users, the three major new additions will be 3D shadows, 3D reflections, and depth of field. These three elements alone can lend vibrancy and realism to any scene to which you add them. Historically, it has been difficult to replicate any of these looks with previous versions of Motion without employing time-consuming visual parlor tricks. The fact that these elements can be toggled on with a click makes me want to load up previous Motion projects I have created and add some 3D realism to spruce up older animations.

Company: Apple

www.apple.com

Product: Motion 4

Assets: Able to easily add 3D shadows, 3D reflections, and depth of field.

Caveats: Realtime HD preview rate means you have to scale down the preview quality when adding effects.

Price: $999 (Final Cut Studio); $299 (upgrade)