First Impressions: Apple at NAB

Feature: Page (1) of 4 - 04/21/04

First Impressions: Apple at NAB New tools and a renewed drive for market dominance By Dave Nagel As of this week, there are apparently two kinds of people in the world of creative production: those who have fallen to their knees in awe of Apple's new products and those who simply haven't had a chance to see them yet. Why? This week at the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Las Vegas, Apple unveiled new and updated software production tools and announced other developments that literally drew gasps and cheers from convention attendees and set off waves of speculation over the company's determination to dominate the market at all costs.

Case in point, of course, is Apple's new motion graphics application, Motion. Generally perceived as an After Effects "killer," it is, in fact, not--at least not in the sense that Final Cut Pro was a Premiere killer, though it will unquestionably draw away a substantial portion of Adobe's current and potential user base.

Said richard Kerris, senior director of pro applications marketing for Apple: "After Effects customers--as with anybody doing desktop compositing--use a lot of different tools. That's proven by all the different plugins that are available. We just think this will be another tool that they'll use. We're not out to replace [After Effects] or anything else because [motion graphics professionals] use a ton of different things depending on what they're doing, and even though there are some areas of overlap, we really see it as complementary. And that's why it's priced at $299."

Adobe, of course, has expressed frustration with Apple in the past over issues of competition, pulling Premiere entirely off the Macintosh platform and launching new applications, such as Encore DVD and Audition, with no support for the Macintosh whatsoever. Adobe this week announced After Effects 6.5, which the company says will support Mac OS X when it's released later this quarter. After Effects, of course, has a much stronger Macintosh user base than Premiere ever had. It remains to be seen what kind of impact Motion will have on sales of After Effects on the Macintosh and how that impact will affect Adobe's willingness to continue to compete with Apple on Apple's own turf.

Regardless of the perception that Motion is a direct competitor to After Effects, there are some key differences that will give Adobe some breathing room (at least until Motion 1.5 is released). Chief among these are the lack of parenting and expressions and, most significant, the lack of support for true 3D compositing.

However, what Motion does offer is something quite unique in the motion graphics market, described by observers at the NAB convention (not just Apple's PR team) as revolutionary, awe-inspiring and simply unbelievable. In fact, some creative professionals I spoke with at the show expressed the sentiment that they'll believe it when they see it.

Well, I saw it--not just on stage, but in person--and there's no denying that it's impressive to say the least. After you have a chance to see it for yourself, you'll be able to forgive me for dedicating most of the space in this article to this incredible application.

Motion in action
"The goal was to do for motion graphics what Final Cut did for non-linear editing," said Apple's Kerris in an interview with DMN. But this may be a bit of an understatement. For all of Final Cut Pro's virtues, it's not a truly unique non-linear editing application. It's a traditional NLE, albeit a powerful one, especially compared with other applications in its price range. But Motion is unique and difficult to characterize for someone who hasn't seen it in action.

Even in its current pre-release form, Motion offers real-time performance even at HD resolutions and allows artists literally to throw effects, text and particles on multiple video tracks and see the results instantly. Parameters can be adjusted in real time via contextual controls that appear when selecting an element of the composition, and entire sequences can be developed without laying down a single keyframe.

"The first thing we set off to do was make this real-time," Kerris said. "No matter how much you throw at it, the machine will constantly strive to keep up with you. And, depending what parameters you set on it, it'll either maintain real-time, or it'll maintain interactive time. The next thing that we did to make animation really easy was [to introduce] this technology called 'behaviors.' This is probably the most revolutionary thing in the motion graphics world because [behaviors simplify] the complexity of doing really hard animation, physical-based property animation."

Behaviors are self-animating effects that operate in a drag and drop fashion. For example, if you have a piece of text that you want to float off the screen, you drag a throw behavior onto the text object, and it starts moving off the screen. Specific parameters, such as speed and direction, are adjusted interactively, even as the animation is playing back so that you can see the effect immediately. The same holds true for all of the physics-based effects in Motion, such as gravity, attraction, repulsion, bounce and others.

But what if you want to change the direction of your throw behavior over time? Motion also includes interactive animation capabilities, which allow you to record your interactions with an object over time, again without laying down any keyframes. When playing back your footage, you can click a record button in Motion, then drag your object on the screen. The object's motion path is created in real-time as you drag. There are more than 90 such effects in Motion, though the application also support the After Effects API, so it will work with most After Effects plugins. (Apple says the performance of After Effects plugins will not be as good as the performance of the built-in effects.)

For users who might be afraid of working in a motion graphics application without keyframes, Motion does include a full track-based timeline tucked away in a collapsible shelf at the bottom of the application's interface (seen below). Effects and object attributes can be keyframed manually, and self-animating effects can be baked into keyframes for more precise manipulation.

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