Apple Motion

At NAB 2004, Apple's Motion press conference was a rock concert, and the best demo at the show. Journalists packed into a room to watch what seemed to be a new take on motion-graphic design, leveraging the G5 and some startling workflow innovations. Like DVD Studio Pro in its most recent incarnation, Motion reduces the technical overhead in the design process for new compositors. Apple has succeeded again in making a complex activity accessible. Still years away is the kind of gestural interface that Tom Cruise orchestrated on a holographic screen in Minority Report, but this could be the first step.

Motion is a design program for text animation, compositing, and effects that emphasizes realtime interactivity and accessibility.

Motion is a design program for text animation, compositing, and effects that emphasizes realtime interactivity. Under the hood, Motion relies heavily on OpenGL. A dual-processor G5 with lots of RAM is recommended. For graphics of modest complexity, the performance is a kick. This is accomplished by providing lots of premade assets that are optimized for the system.

More than anything else, Motion is fun. It is not an After Effects killer, although many editors who only tap part of After Effects' functionality may find Motion a simpler solution for projects of modest complexity. Motion has sophisticated compositing architecture, but it isn't a visual effects tool. It lacks the control and precision that programs like Shake, After Effects, and Combustion provide.

Some of the interface conventions pioneered in DVD Studio Pro and Final Cut Pro are present in Motion, for instance, DVD Studio Pro's dynamic guides or interface layout presets. When you first open Motion, the program hides many palettes and tools, leaving the minimum number of tools required for basic design. This is similar to DVD Studio Pro, which progressively exposes tool interfaces for basic, intermediate, and advanced operations. The underlying principle in Motion is accessibility. Apple is appealing to the market segment overwhelmed by Shake. Motion works for low-level graphics needs, but less so for dedicated motion-graphics designers.

Motion's basic interface can be configured in various ways. Here is the core layout: On the left side of the screen there is a Project Manager, similar to the layout of After Effects. Here you can preview, import, and organize images, movies, and text elements. The Canvas, the central work area, is in the middle of the screen. At the bottom of the Canvas there are simple timeline and transport controls. Hidden from view, but easily invoked, is a layer-based timeline. There are several layout configurations available under the Windows menu and the option to save custom layouts as well. At this point, users have everything needed for basic motion-graphics design.

If you import any of Motion's various stock elements, such as LiveType, filters, or particle effects, the floating palette Dashboard appears, similar to the effects palette in After Effects. This contains the basic controls for effects and elements dropped in the Canvas. However, only the most basic controls are featured. To access all the controls you will need to use the Inspector which is located to the right of the Canvas. Clicking the “I” in the Dashboard brings up the Inspector.

The Timeline adds some editing and trimming features typical of an NLE. You can trim a clip and add multiple clips to a layer. In After Effects you can have only one clip per layer. If you are staggering effects in time clips begin to disappear from the screen horizontally, the later it is in time. Clips that begin later in time than 00:00:00 are not grayed out until the playhead reaches the start time. This is a small but nice touch that helps you keep track of complex projects.

If I had to single out the one thing that has made digital compositing possible, it's the alpha channel. Any element can be used as an alpha mask, including a movie of a wisp of smoke, a cloud of particle smoke, text, a gradient, or a filter effect. Motion allows you to select the alpha based on its gray scale luminance and apply it using any of Motion's 25 transfer modes. You can quickly drop any of the dozens of premade assets that come with Motion into a comp and layer them with motion in a matter of seconds.

This is a scattershot “found art” approach to design. It is not the way most designers work. Most designers work toward a conceptual goal with input from clients. When you are handed a storyboard and visual reference, including the overall style of a program or commercial, Motion's pastiche-style method is less valuable, and suddenly, After Effects' complexity is justified.

Motion uses OpenGL to provide impressive interactivity. I found you can pile three to four effects on several objects in a half-dozen layers and still keep things moving at 15fps. This is great for some final animation and for previsualizing more complex projects. It's also easy to slow things down to a crawl. Because clients ask only for results, you will find some designs will remain fast-moving throughout the design process while others will require incremental renders. However, there's no RAM preview, which is one of the few really serious drawbacks of the product.

One aspect of Motion is an industry trend: the quantity of stock effects. Pre-made graphics, particles, and footage are now part of an application's arsenal. There will be artists that create a style out of stock solutions, but it's not for everyone.

To make the case for this approach, I should mention that effects could be applied to other effects and to themselves. This would create a pipeline of effects. The elements would soon make themselves into something other than stock effects. To do this effectively means moving out of realtime territory, attaining original results but giving up the speed of creation that made the process attractive in the first place. To be fair, Apple is heading in the right direction. As Motion matures and hardware becomes faster, the realtime approach ultimately will win out.

Much of what is at the core of Motion's drag-and-drop, rapid-prototyping approach is rooted in behaviors. Behaviors are applied forces that automatically animate the parameters in a layer. A wind force can blow a text element across the screen because it is changing the element's x- and y-position parameters. Opacity can be made to oscillate with a waveform behavior, and gravity can make vector-shaped boxes fall and bounce. There are many behaviors, and they can be added multiple times. Elements can be made to collide and/or repel each other. Particle behaviors can apply physics to particles, which themselves can be based on images affected by a previous behavior. Because there are dozens of forces, parameters, and combinations, the potential combinations are almost endless. However, this is not the same thing as being endlessly practical.

Apple calls this “animation without keyframes.” The tradeoff is you have more limited control over the outcome of your animation, which can become frustrating when timing is critical.

The animation-without-keyframes approach was first introduced in After Effects' plug-in Particle Playground. It was powerful but not user-friendly. Motion's behaviors are user-friendly and benefit from OpenGL, which was not available for After Effects when Particle Playground was introduced. Behaviors create great demos, which many cable and corporate video artists will see as the wave of their futures.

If behaviors misbehave, Motion has good keyframe control with constant, linear, Bézier, continuous, and ease-in and ease-out interpolation. The keyframe editor is nice and big (Adobe should take note of this for After Effects), with effective filtering of views. A complex collection of curves doesn't look like spaghetti. Color-coded boxes let you select the x and y axes separately. Overall, this is a functional editor for version 1.0.

Motion has a 2D particle system similar to the one in Combustion and Wondertouch ParticleIllusion. All three programs have presets and realtime interactivity, courtesy of OpenGL. Apple makes it easy to use. Select an image, text, or movie in your computer, then hit the Make Particles button. The object emits multiple copies of itself with all of the particle parameters ready for customization. You can apply behaviors to a particle effect, which accounts for the great demos at NAB. You can build networks of interactive effects to quickly prototype an idea. Artists will quickly learn to use this to their advantage, even if it means rethinking how they work.

Text is what motion graphics is all about (at least in the paying end of the craft). All text in commercial work conveys the same message: “Buy this.” But it takes lots of roundabout language to get there, and that takes a good text tool. Motion certainly has the basics down. Position, opacity, rotation, and scale can be animated along with format, style, and layout parameters, such as tracking. You add text to a layer by clicking the “T” in the toolbar and typing directly in the Canvas. Text is vector-based, as it should be. When you access the handy Dashboard for text you have a long list of parameters, like those mentioned above. Click the “I” in the Dashboard, and Inspector opens an even longer list of parameters.

The text tool's strength is a fair amount of control combined with tight integration with the other tools. Motion does not have the sophisticated type control added in the last few versions of After Effects, but it provides an easier environment for intermediate users to design simple but elegant graphics.

Motion benefits from launching fairly late in the evolution of compositing tools. Apple has cherry-picked ideas from After Effects and Combustion, added innovations, and integrated everything in an elegant package. Add Apple's ability to leverage its own hardware, and you can see why Motion is making news. Motion provides a measure of the sophistication of After Effects and Combustion, without the precision and carefully tuned pipeline.

There is a large audience of Final Cut Pro users who need to make graphics but are not dedicated graphic artists at the top of their craft. For them, Motion is going to seem like the Second Coming. Few After Effects users will be converted. But with so many people getting into CG, it's not a zero-sum world. Apple is creating a new audience. If it repeats the engineering and interface craftsmanship that made Final Cut Pro a success, then Motion will become a standard. At $299, it's a lot of fun to use and a great solution for many editors.