Motion or After Effects

[Simon Denny]

Motion or After Effects
I’m thinking of trying to take my video editing/effects into another dimension and before I get going, I wonder what most people prefer to use in conjunction with Final Cut Pro. What advantages are there between these two for a round trip. One thing I have noticed is the amount of plug-ins for AE vs Motion.

I know this is a board type question but would like some feed back from others

[Ron Wilk]

I am hardly a visual effects pro but, IMO, from the viewpoint of transfer ease and learning curve, Motion wins over AE but AE probably has more to offer. Personally, given the requirements for moving back and forth between FCP and AE, I have not been using AE with any frequency but, instead, have employed a combination of Motion and Boris Red(FCP Plugin). Certainly, you will find many naysayers but in the end it might just add up to a matter of personal preference and needs as each software package seems to excel in one realm or another.

[G. Lee Gordon]

After Effects is definitely the standard. So the question is, are you learning for personal use or to further your career?

[Simon Denny]

Yeah I should have stated what is the standard and It would have been AE.

[Jonathan Massey]

It also depends on what you need to be done, some things are easier achieved or get better results in different softwares. the basic difference between motion and AE is that motion works on behaviors and AE works mainly on keyframing techniques. for example, if you need to have titles fly around then perhaps AE is more suitable while if you just want to create some mist or clouds then motion does a great job.

[Cole McDonald]

There are also many more free tutorials out there for AE, but I think both can do the same things in different ways.

[Jon Geddes]

You will definitely be able to find more tutorials and resources for After Effects, as it is much more widely used in the industry on both PC and Mac.

There will obviously be certain things that are easier to accomplish in Motion than in AE, but for most compositors and motion graphic artists, AE is better overall. It really depends on your workflow and what type of projects you work on. You could always try to learn both then decide which one you like better.

[Paul E. Coleman]

As mentioned Motion works better with Final Cut in that you don't need to render out movies, you can just drag the project file directly into the Final Cut Timeline. Any changes you make in the Motion Project automatically show up in Final Cut. Same for LiveType. After Effects works better with Premiere Pro for easy roundtripping. I use After Effects the most and don't find it a problem rendering out movies.

As far as ease of use, their completely different ways of thinking. Motion is mostly templates and pre-fabbed behaviors, that you tweak to your liking. After Effects is more timeline-based keyframing. There are presets in AE that you can apply to automatically do things, but their not as refined as in motion. I find it easier to build some things from scratch as far as paths for flying things around or parenting and rotating logos, but then if I need fire, flames or confetti I turn to Motion.

To learn both might be a daunting task. After Effects is used for more high-end productions, but Motion is being used more and more each day. Maybe try Motion first as it's easier to roundtrip. Delve too deep and you'll find After Effects difficult.

[Simon Denny]

I've gone straight into into After Effects and love it.
Man it's one piece of software to get my head around but I'm starting on some real easy DVD menus, supers, and just mucking around with it in my spare time.
I have always wanted to get going with AE but was a bit daunted by the learning cure.
One click after the other I'm getting used to AE. I will also get going with Motion at a later time. I find the work flow a breeze with importing files from AE.

Cool

[Floris van Eck]

I was in the same boat.

I like the idea of easy round-tripping with Final Cut Pro. But at the end I decided to go with After Effects as well. Mainly because Photoshop and Illustrator are both Adobe programs and you can easily share things with Dynamic Link. I don't like Premiere Pro so that's no option. Another import criteria is the creation of DVD and BluRay discs. Apple has halted development of DVD Studio Pro (so it seems) while Encore has been top notch with BluRay authoring and great After Effects round-tripping. That made my choice easier.

I also think keyframe animation can be more practical if you want to do like animation movies in the future but I might be wrong.

[Cole McDonald]

Apple used to have "publish and subscribe" built into the framework of the OS that worked from program to program, I miss that (back in the OS8 days)... that would remove round tripping altogether and worked more like dropping a motion file directly into FCP, where it would update as soon as you would save changes in the external program.

[Austin Meyers]

I use motion professionally, and i have to say that the round tripping abilities make it really quick and easy to create really nice pro graphics with as little as just entering text into the controls tab of FCP. something else to note is that motion also round trips to DVDSP allowing you to create intros + looped backgrounds.

something else to consider is what kind of work are you doing? I'm currently working on a big budget movie and we're using all node based compositing software, which has it's advantages and disadvantages. node based is really nice for pulling keys and dealing with really big compositions with lots of pieces where there are few motion graphics. i prefer layer based for working with stuff that is heavy text/vector based. i also like motions stabilization and tracking better than what's available in fusion, can't comment on the trackers in AE.

i haven't used AE in quite some time so i'm not exactly up on it's keyframe interface vs motion, but i really like motions keyframing, compared to eyeon's fusion i think motions implementation of the keyframe editor and basic animation workflow is better. i like being able to rough in animation paths within the canvas in motion and then fire up the keyframe editor and fine tune the animations.

[Dean Sensui]

Not sure if this matters to most, but AE's render algorithm is excellent. When it comes to scaling images it's hard to beat. Certainly it's far superior to what FCP can do. Not sure if Motion is tied to FCP's render engine or if it has one of it's own. But that is something worth looking at.

As for me, I started with Commotion and moved to AE. I don't have the time right now to learn yet another compositor.

I also have Silhouette Roto which features a very good motion tracker -- superior to the one that AE features.

And then there's Primatte. Motion incorporated some version of it within it's keyer. I had to buy Primatte as a stand-alone. But it's worth every penny if doing perfect greenscreen keying is essential to your work.