Love it

As a newcomer to motion graphics, I did a lot of online research. Apparently, you’re not supposed to compare Motion with After Effects. And I agree. Sorta.
As someone who wanted to dive in deep in order to start playing with motion graphics, I had to choose to invest my time learning one or the other… at least to begin with.
Money wasn’t really the issue in my case, although it was definitely a big win to pay $50 once rather than pay monthly for AE.
Either way, I just found Motion way more approachable. Way more.
Plus, it seems that Motion is much better suited for experimenting and playing with effects and parameters in real-time.
I’m using it artistically, so it’s just perfect.
I actually started with AE… watched hours of online tutorials, started to get the hang of the basics.
But here’s what absolutely did it for me:
In AfterEffects CC, unless I’m totally missing something, there is no way to preview font choices within the software. Not only can you not preview your font change, but even the font dropdown list doesn’t show the font names in their matching font. I’m still boggled by it… for a piece of software that is heavily used to animate text, seems to me that previewing fonts would be V1.0 functionality.
In any case, compare that with Motion where all the font names in the dropdown font list actually use their matching font… just like they do in Keynote or most other Apple products. But Motion takes it a step further and you can actually highlight your text and scroll through the font list and see your text change fonts without actually having to select/change the font. It’s a live preview.
Anyway, this is just one example of how I found Motion to be way more friendly than AE.
So if you’re evaluating Motion over AE, it feels to me like if you’re “in the industry” than you may have little choice but to go with the gold standard. But if you want to have fun with an exceptionally powerful and amazing tool, spend $50 and have a blast.

sraposa about Motion