Apple Motion

From Free net encyclopedia

Template:Infobox Software Motion is a software application produced by Apple Computer for their Mac OS X operating system. It is used to create and edit motion graphics and titling for video production.

1 History
2 Market Position
3 Features
4 How Motion Works
5 References
6 External links

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History

The original product was introduced on April 19, 2004.

At a pre NAB event in April 2005 Apple released the second version of Motion along with new revisions of the other Pro applications, optimised for the Power Mac G5 and Mac OS X v10.4.

The latest version of Motion is part of the Final Cut Studio suite. In January 2006 Apple stopped selling Motion as a stand-alone product.

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Market Position

Motion competes with compositing applications such as Adobe After Effects and Discreet Combustion. It does not have the ultimate power of those older and more complex programs, but it is both less expensive and more accessible to the beginner.

Unlike the competition, Motion will perform many effects in real time, which arguably makes it much easier to use and understand. Using behaviors (see below), Motion can create complex and sophisticated effects very easily. However, few After Effects users have entirely replaced it with Motion, because AE still has many powerful features Motion lacks.

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Features

Original features of Motion include the ability to create custom particle effects (as well as using pre-built ones) and to add filters, effects and animations in real time.

New features in version two of Motion include more responsive live editing, the ability to address up to 4 GB of RAM and GPU acceleration at 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit float color depths. There is also a new 'replicator' function, which allows an object to be replicated to create a repeating pattern of a specified size and shape. With this method, it is also possible to create animations in which the elements of a replicated pattern move in sequence. Motion 2 can also integrate with a MIDI keyboard, so that parameters can be controlled by keys or faders; this opens up the possibility of live performances with Motion.

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How Motion Works

Motion uses pixel shaders which move the processing of video effects to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) of a modern graphics card. Motion is also compatible with Apple's Core Image technology, allowing one to use the Image Units that come standard with Mac OS X Tiger. Like pixel shaders, Core Image 'stacks' various effects, allowing a number of effects to be combined together without slow-down. Improvements in video technology (i.e. a new graphics card) are the easiest way to improve the performance of the program.

In Motion, users can import their own graphics files and use pre-prepared graphics such as text and shapes. Objects can be grouped into layers, like other motion graphics programs, but they always retain their own distinct identity. It's easy to take various parts, each of which are individual objects, and group them into a layer. Selecting that layer permits moving all of the objects as a body. This hierarchical system can be confusing at first, but it is very powerful once mastered.

Motion introduced behaviors, which can be combined to create realistic animations. For instance, take an object and activate the Throw behavior to send it across the screen. Then, apply Gravity to it to make it fall down realistically. Next, apply an Edge Collision to it and the combination of these effects will cause the ball to bounce around the screen in a way that looks realistic to the human eye. The effects can be tweaked utilizing various parameters, varying the strength of the bounces, the amount of gravity to apply and so on.

This is very different from traditional animation software, which requires the use of key frames to determine the position of an object at any given time. The software then automatically creates motion to fill the spaces between the keyframes. This makes it easy to know exactly where objects are on the screen at any given time, but it is considerably more difficult to create realistic animations that build up on different, conflicting forces.

Motion can also animate with key frames, and these can be combined with behaviors in the same object.

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