Motion 5 integration is actually damn impressive

[Hywel]

Hi All,

On to my second project with FCPX, and started playing with the Motion 5 integration (guided by the excellent Ripple Training video tutorials).

Damn, but the integration with Motion 5 is impressive!

I was feeling a bit disconsolate because lacking my usual plugins I didn't have white diffusion to hand. So I thought I'd try to create something like it as a custom effect in Motion 5.

Made an effects template project, dragged a clip in to the placeholder to see what I was doing. Cloned the layer twice, added a soft focus blur and a sharpen to the top clone. (I usually like to offset the detail softening of white diffusion with a bit of sharpening, to retain crispness whilst getting the highlight blooming that makes talent look good and old country house locations look like something out Jeeves & Wooster). Changed the blend mode to Soft Light.

Published the project to FCPX, publishing the amount slider for the soft focus and sharpen, the blend mode and the blend opacity. So those show up as controls in FCPX when I apply the effects to my clips.

Now I have a custom dramatic effect which I can control directly in FCPX with the parameters I'm most likely to tweak, applied it to the relevant clips in my project and it looks really good. Perhaps not Magic Bullet diffusion effect levels of control and physical simulation of what's going on, but I was rather impressed for my first round trip through Motion 5. It was all done in less than an hour (including time to watch the tutorial and export the rough cut!)

Remember that FCPX and Motion now share a floating point linear light render model, which is quite something. Basically FCPX is now the cutting front end to that rendering power and Motion is the compositing front end. They are both working in the same model, so you can do pretty clever stuff with the two combined. In all the ballyhoo about FCPX, it is easy to forget what a big step forward that is under the bonnet.

Cheers, Hywel

[filmguy123]

yeah, the Motion 5 integration is very, very slick

[david_p]

how is the RT performance once you get the motion effect back into FCPX?

david

[TheReverend]

I haven't seen this answered anywhere, but can you make custom transitions effects for FCPX in motion 5?

[Hywel]

Yes, you can. Indeed many of the transitions in FCPX were created in Motion (you can edit a copy of them to get started with a new transition or to learn how the system works).

RT performance was fine for me, and it seems to be doing some pretty intelligent things with any retimed footage if you switch on optical flow. I had a segment shot in 50 fps transitioning to 25 fps where I wanted to bridge the speed change with some retimed footage at the start of the 25 fps clip, just for a few seconds to prevent a visual "jerk". It took a while to analyse and render the first time, but when I applied my White Diffusion custom effect it was very quick to render the second time, so I believe it has remembered the optical flow analysis and reused it on the second render pass.

I think the render engine of FCPX is quite hopeful. It seems similar to the Mercury engine playback in PPro CS5 on my system: can't see a reason to choose between them on speed at the moment.

And I am really liking the fluidity of edit decisions in FCPX. I still have PPro CS5 as my fallback for the future if FCPX doesn't do what I need (and FCP6 for a while too of course) but I'm enjoying working in FCPX more at the moment.

Cheers, Hywel

[TheReverend]

Yes, you can. Indeed many of the transitions in FCPX were created in Motion (you can edit a copy of them to get started with a new transition or to learn how the system works).

To me, this is epic. Lack of quality transitions is super limiting in editing style. I found a few ones that I like for FCP7, and obviously they won't work in FCP7. So that had me worried because a good flashy transition is so necessary in common high energy edits.But being able to start from a template and build your own transitions? Able to easily build a custom set of transitions that are finely tuned and easy to implement. Sign me up! Love it!

[Hywel]

Hmm. I may have spoken too soon. Going back to the project with the Motion-published effect today, it seems to have lost its published parameters and not be rendering properly as a result. Editing it in Motion and re-applying fixed it, but I don't know whether I cocked up (entirely possible) or whether it is a bug. Maybe I saved it after the publish or something... anyone else have this? Symptom is screen render goes blue and the published parameters disappear from the effect.

Still, the principle is good even if I haven't quite got my head around using it...

Cheers, Hywel

[Hywel]

A follow up, in case anyone else hits this problem of having motion stuff "turn blue" (can't quite bring myself to call it the blue screen of death!)

The problem seems to be caused by some old stuff from previous versions of motion hanging around in
user/library/application support/motion/
I renamed that to MOTIONOLD and everything now seems to work.

Cheers, Hywel

[BenB]

To clarify some statements made here. ALL of the transitions, effects (formerly called filters), text generators, etc, are ALL Motion 5 templates, period. Not "most", all of them are.

And they run just fine in FCP X, not sluggish with tons of render time like in legacy versions of FCP/Motion. When they do need to render, the playback before rendering is very good, the render time is super fast.

And yes, any end user who wants to "roll your own" transitions, effects, text templates, etc, really needs to do the two Ripple Training video series on Motion 5. The whole point is that you no longer need to learn FXPlug scripting language (very difficult), you only need to learn Motion. Very wicked cool!

One last point, I have found if I update a published Motion template, it's best to Save As, and over write the previous version. Hope that helps.

"Rock Those Edits!"

[trailsuender]

Hmmm, from my point of view, there is no integration at all, except the Apple templates in FCPX. Did you ever try to send a clip from your timeline to Motion 5 like it was possible FCP7 to Motion 4?

This is simply not possible, also not in (today's) current version 10.0.3.

So, where's the integration???

Hi All,

On to my second project with FCPX, and started playing with the Motion 5 integration (guided by the excellent Ripple Training video tutorials).

Damn, but the integration with Motion 5 is impressive!

I was feeling a bit disconsolate because lacking my usual plugins I didn't have white diffusion to hand. So I thought I'd try to create something like it as a custom effect in Motion 5.

Made an effects template project, dragged a clip in to the placeholder to see what I was doing. Cloned the layer twice, added a soft focus blur and a sharpen to the top clone. (I usually like to offset the detail softening of white diffusion with a bit of sharpening, to retain crispness whilst getting the highlight blooming that makes talent look good and old country house locations look like something out Jeeves & Wooster). Changed the blend mode to Soft Light.

Published the project to FCPX, publishing the amount slider for the soft focus and sharpen, the blend mode and the blend opacity. So those show up as controls in FCPX when I apply the effects to my clips.

Now I have a custom dramatic effect which I can control directly in FCPX with the parameters I'm most likely to tweak, applied it to the relevant clips in my project and it looks really good. Perhaps not Magic Bullet diffusion effect levels of control and physical simulation of what's going on, but I was rather impressed for my first round trip through Motion 5. It was all done in less than an hour (including time to watch the tutorial and export the rough cut!)

Remember that FCPX and Motion now share a floating point linear light render model, which is quite something. Basically FCPX is now the cutting front end to that rendering power and Motion is the compositing front end. They are both working in the same model, so you can do pretty clever stuff with the two combined. In all the ballyhoo about FCPX, it is easy to forget what a big step forward that is under the bonnet.

Cheers, Hywel