AE Advantages over Motion?
by Nate Hanson
on
May 16, 2008 at 2:33:03 pm
I teach a high school multimedia course and I have access to both After Effects and Motion. I'm wondering if there would be any reason to teach both programs.
This year I only taught AE - mostly because there were so many great (free) resources available that I was able to learn the software fairly quickly. I haven't seen much in the way of free training for Motion and I don't know how to use the software yet.
1) Are there any advantages to using AE over Motion or do they both offer basically the same tools?
Re: AE Advantages over Motion? by Ron Coy on May 16, 2008 at 3:49:20 pm
that's a matter of debate... a can of worms I'm afraid to open myself.
On this forum, you'll likely hear After Effects as the choice. Well, duh. It's an After Effects forum.
I don't use Motion much yet. I am familiar and comfortable with the After Effects interface and toolset. However, there are REALLY cool built in functions of Motion (especially the latest version) that I could utilize much faster and easier than I can do things in After Effects. You can look at the Motion page on Apple's website for videos that show some of the capabilities of the program.
That being said, I think that After Effects is definitely more powerful. It is more flexible, offers more control over everything, and has a ton of very useful plugins and filters, and a ton of resources (that didn't exist when I first started with it) that make learning it much easier. Well, maybe not easier to learn than Motion, but certainly cheaper.
Easier to use does not equal better. Motion can do some cool stuff quickly, and it has a bright future as a compositing program for non-compositors (meaning video editors can pick it up more easily than using After Effects IMHO), but if you want to do really awesome stuff, with a rock solid toolset... can't beat After Effects.
Re: AE Advantages over Motion? by Ken Latman on May 16, 2008 at 8:06:14 pm
One other consideration in the debate would be the fact that Motion does not run on a windows PC.
Though I am a mac fan, your students may want to explore one of the applications out of class and AE would provide somewhat of a level playing field.
You can always use Motion projects within AE and treat it as a plug-in for those quick particles and behavior type effects.
Re: AE Advantages over Motion? by Dave LaRonde on May 16, 2008 at 9:10:33 pm
Here's a couple more considerations:
I don't think I've ever seen an ad saying, "Apple Motion Artists Wanted". However, that's hardly the case for AE. Perhaps that's due to the fact that AE's been around for years, and it's a known quantity in the business, but AE is the more widely-used application by far.
Apple's Shake is a known industry product, and while Motion has a big subset of Shake's capabilities, I think there's an industry perception that it's a more consumer-based application. There's DVD Studio Pro, and then there's iDVD. There's Soundtrack Pro, and then there's Garage Band. There's After Effects, and then there's Motion. Whether it's valid or not, I think a lot of people perceive Motion as sort of an "iAfter Effects".
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
