Motion App Reviews

I am a college student who primarly uses motion for infographic animations, enhancements, and sfx for my FCPX videos. I taught myself how to use this software and its very intuitive. It is extreamly powerful and comes with many great preloaded features. If your not the creative type you can download several templates from motionVFX.com that can really help you stand out. Making videos to summerize your projects is great for a portfolio piece. When I downloaded motion my primary purpose was to use it for kinetic typography projects. It turns out that I use it for so much more. Its easy implimenation with FCPX makes it even more appealing if you are comfortable with FCPX. For $50 you really cant beat it! There are no other programs that I know of that offer the power of motion in that price range. I would strongly recomend Motion to anyone who enjoys creating videos and cool effects to enhance your projects. GREAT JOB APPLE!

As an avid Multi-Media artist I love using this program. It’s simple straight to the point and so many motion possibilities. I would give it 5 stars but there is a flaw I found. Since the new update the interment plugin works but all of a sudden parameter plugins don’t work. I have no idea what’s going on so please send an update to fix this problem. PLEASE!!!

Why this critical feature was removed from the new Apple video suite (FCPX, Motion 5, Compressor) is mind boggling. Motion 5 is basically the backbone of FCPX. And yet you have to subject yourself to the cumbersome, time-consuming, error-prone process of exporting individual clips from FCPX, then manually import them into Motion, then export a new clip from Motion and then manually import it back into FCPX **for every new iteration of an effect edit you want to do**. WHAT? The FCPX/Motion 5 combo would be a viable After Effects competitor if they brought this feature back! (YES, it used to exist in the former FCP7/Motion 4 days! Why, oh WHY did they get rid of it?!?!). Otherwise, it is a fantastic program and a real value as an After Effects alternative. The best part of Motion is being able to customize FCPX effects/transitions/etc. and create new ones to use inside FCPX. It’s been 5 years since the new Apple video reboot, and still no round-tripping. There must be some essential part of the software’s design that prevents this feature from working, otherwise I can only imagine Apple would have included it. Maybe it’s still on the roadmap. One can dream, right?

Motion is an amazing compositor and a decent non-linear editor. In a nutshell, Motion is Apple’s answer to After Effects. While it lacks some of After Effects capabilities (notably built-in 3d rendering) you can get a third-party add-on and still be way ahead. And underlying it is the technology that Shake was built on, so what it does, it does very, very well. Motion is not something you can just pick up and use (despite Apple providing a few templates you can use pretty much as is), although it’s at least as easy as anything that does what it can do. If you’ve never used a proper non-linear editor or compositing tool before, expect a pretty steep learning curve. In essence, Motion is Photoshop for video, except each layer potentially a video track, key-framed, and festooned with non-destructive “effects” layers (including 2D and 3D transformations). If you want to edit long form videos, Motion is not the tool you want to use (there’s Final Cut Pro X, if you prefer something cross-platform there’s Hitfilm, and of course there’s always Adobe CS if you’re OK renting software). I tend to work with pretty short stuff so Motion is actually a complete solution for my needs. If I were still putting together short films or chopping up huge amounts of video, I would pick FCPX. One area where Motion comes up short relative to After Effects in particular is — no surprise — workflow with Adobe products. If you use CS you can import a Photoshop or Illustrator document and get editable layers which you can simply start working with, while still being able to make adjustments locally or round-trip out to Photoshop or Illustrator. But if you’ve got Adobe CS you already have After Effects and Premiere, so either you know what they can do and they still kind of annoy you or you don’t care. Still, it would be great if Motion exposed some kind of API so that Adobe’s competitors (e.g. Affinity’s products or Acorn, say) could round-trip the same way. Oh well, maybe Motion 6.