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Filed under: Motion Graphics •Year End Lists •

The Top Ten Things After Effects Users Love and Hate about Motion

9) Text Animation.

The text engine in Motion is very similar in scope and power to AE, but many folks find it much faster and easier to use, particularly when creating letter-by-letter animation.

10) Camera Animation.

The camera behaviors in Motion make it almost shockingly easy to create smooth, accurate camera moves which sweep around sets of objects or fly to precisely to other points in 3D space.

Of course, not everything is wine and roses. Here are the top 10 things that After Effects users hate about Motion:

1) The User Interface.

One of the most off-putting things to an AE user is Motion’s UI - mostly because it’s so different from AE, and nothing is where they expect it to be. In particular, hardcore AE users will doggedly try to work exclusively in the Timeline in Motion - which invariably frustrates the heck out of them. And why can’t you use JKL to navigate or Shift-Z to fit the Timeline to window, like Final Cut?

2) One Comp Shall Rule Them All.

An After Effect’s user’s work is built around creating multiple compositions within a project. In Motion, the project file IS the comp - you can pre-compose by putting layers into groups and groups into other groups, but you can’t create separate comps in one Motion project. Rather, you create separate Motion projects. It’s a functional workflow - but it’s not fast or intuitive for an AE user.

3) Keyframing.

At first, After Effects users are relieved to discover that Motion does, in fact, have keyframing functionality - complete with many of the same keyboard shortcuts as either AE or Final Cut Pro - but they quickly get frustrated when trying to do simple things like changing keyframe interpolation and getting unpredictable results.

4) Expressions, Parenting, and Nulls.

None of these AE elements has an exact counterpart in Motion. While behaviors work much like expressions do, you can’t write your own. And there is no way to link a parameter of one layer to a different parameter of another - for example, you can’t make the scale of one layer drive the rotation of another layer - a simple task in After Effects. Grouping provides a sort of parenting function, but the basic fact is that these powerful tools in After Effects really don’t have any equivalent in Motion.

5) Complex Projects.

Here’s where Motion’s realtime design comes back to bite you: as soon as you build a moderately complex project, the whole system bogs down. Anything near realtime goes out the window (even with a powerful graphics card, assiduous soloing of layers and creating short play ranges) and you end up beachballing and waiting for screen updates. Argh!

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Not only would the retime file take *days* of time (3 estimated), but when it actually did so (left open over the weekend, apparently), filled my boot drive completely with about 250GB of retime data - which I then had to hunt for and destroy.

A nice feature, incompletely executed. AE is very strong in that regard.

Posted by Allan W.  on  12/08  at  05:24 PM

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It might sound like I hate Motion, but nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve found the FCP integration and templates has revolutionized my video workflow. It’s SO much more efficient for lower thirds, bumpers, and intros than AE. The replicators, generators, and behaviors are just fun to use. I have a Mac Pro, Radeon 3870, and 10GB of RAM, so things run pretty smoothly.

AE does look better most of the time - better 3D controls, DOF, expressions, etc. It’s still more powerful when you need to create a piece entirely in that app (say, a commercial or show bumper). If you’re using (stuck with?) Premiere you get the same kind of integration that FCP enjoys with Motion.

But Motion has let me focus on getting stuff done simply and more quickly. Knowing its limitations and advantages has let me know when to choose which program.

Posted by Allan W.  on  12/08  at  05:34 PM

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