Best Buy

  • Price: 169 . 765

  • Company: Apple

  • Pros: Replicators, new filters and effects, 32-bit float projects, GPU hardware acceleration, and tighter integration with Apple and Adobe applications take the application forward.

  • Cons: You need a fast and powerful Mac and GPU to get the best from it; and a large amount of system hard disk needs to be reserved for library of effects.

  • Our Rating: We rate this 9 out of 10 We rate this 9 out of 10

The original version of Motion made it incredibly easy to add filters to footage and assorted elements. The first upgrade to Apple’s motion-graphics software still offers real-time drag-&-drop application of filters and other effects, and subsequent fine-tuning using the floating Dashboard (a precursor to the one in Mac OS X Tiger). The software is still as easy-to-use as ever, but the filters are now vamped up by GPU acceleration.

The workflow has been sped up, with speed scalable to take advantage of faster processors and more RAM. Motion 2 introduces GPU-accelerated, 32-bit, floating-point colour, and film-quality rendering – though if you’re not working with resolutions that big, your QuickTime output is still going to be really high quality.

Filters – and the footage they are applied to – can all be contained in the same layer or sublayer. You can then add a separate layer for the effects applied to text, for example. In this way, projects can be built up very quickly and logically and just as rapidly changed without affecting other parts of the project.

A control allowing you to define or crop the size of a layer has also been added to the Inspector. This Fixed Resolution parameter allows you to stop the size of layers becoming too unwieldy, speeding up processing time.

Creative behaviour

border=0 />You apply Behaviours in the same way as you apply filters. Behaviours, though, are capable of adding animated effects to objects without the need for keyframing. To speed up or slow down behaviours, you simply change the length of the behaviour’s ‘region’ in the mini-Timeline below the main canvas Window. </p> <p> It is possible to keyframe, though, and one of the new enhancements is a Custom Speed velocity curve in the Keyframe Editor. Here you can keyframe custom values to make an object travel forward a specific percentage of the path, then backward, then forward, and so on, before it reaches the end of the animation. </p> <p> You can also make use of a MIDI Parameter behaviour that allows you to edit and animate object parameters using standard MIDI devices, such as a musical keyboard or synthesizer. </p> <p> Applying multiple behaviours to a piece of animated text however brought up a warning notice that the effect was too large to render (we were using a widescreen display at 1,920-x-1,200 resolution). This was due to file-size import limitations – Motion is graphics-card-dependent so make sure you have the hardware to fully realize your projects.<BR> <BR> Motion now automatically saves backups of your project in a folder on your hard drive, time- and date-stamped for easier retrieval, so there’s no need to panic if your hardware crashes. </p> <p> The Motion Library boasts three new Generators. The first, called Caustics, creates an animated, simulated water surface, or it can add light patterns to a project. Clouds creates animated cloud patterns with customizable cloud layers, while Membrane creates a sheer, animated sheet moving in 3D space.<BR> <BR> <b>Smokin’</b> </p> <p> There are more than 50 new particle effects – Motion has an integrated particle system generally used to simulate real-world effects such as smoke, sparks, or rain. Particle emitter parameters allow you to emit points from the centre or outline of a Rectangle, Burst, Spiral or a Wave, and new shapes have been added here too. </p> <p> <div class=floatedimage><img src= Print

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