Apple Final Cut Studio 2 is increasingly becoming the final cut solution of large TV stations, video clip and movie makers. Final Cut Studio 2 comes with Motion 3, a significant upgrade, with some interesting new features. Even by just looking at Motion it becomes clear why large TV stations believe Apple’s solution is superior to competing products. Power is successfully linked to user-friendliness. I might also add that Motion can be put to good use by cross-media publishers and designers, who want to rapidly create stunning QuickTime animations and movies.

Motion 3 has 3D capabilities, Paint, motion tracking and stability, Final Cut Pro integration, retiming, and audio behaviours. It also comes with an Advanced Keyframe Editor, of which I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it’s there to attract After Effects users.

Motion 3 has 3D capabilities, it says in the new features summary. At first I thought Motion now enabled us to create 3D objects, but of course, the three dimensions in Motion apply to using the three planes for moving, scaling and rotating your objects, video clips and all. As with every other feature in Motion, the 3D functionality is implemented with a deceivable interface—deceivable by its simplicity. You can manipulate objects by grabbing a 3D globe. It does require some getting used to as your hand’s normal mouse motions are too coarse for subtle 3D handling.

Paint With Light

3D, however, is not the most spectacular and creativity boosting feature in Motion 3. In my opinion, that role is reserved for Paint. With Paint, you can literally draw light trails across anything that’s on the canvas. This means you can paint just colour streaks, but also --using Motion’s preset brushes-- with light. If you select the latter, the light streak isn’t shown to you until you render the scene --painting with the scene rendered in real-time is possible with a fast Mac, but it does give you a headache.

Paint opens up a whole can of… creative possibilities. Retiming is new in Motion 3 as well. It lets you slow down or speed up clips without affecting sound. I found that it can be used to sync out-of-sync video with audio when the differences aren’t too dramatic. I also found you can actually do some creative stuff with that as well. Audio behaviours are another novelty in Motion 3. They enable animations driven by audio. I didn’t try this out.

What I did test thoroughly is the better integration between Motion and Final Cut Pro, and that has been improved by more than a margin. First of all, you can pull in a Final Cut Pro project from within Motion 3, or you can push it to Motion from within FCP. But you can also set up templates in Motion that can be used as masters in Final Cut Pro. This allows you to make changes to a single project and cascade these to a number of Final Cut Pro projects and sequences.

Motion “Drop Zones” will carry over to Final Cut Pro. Drop zones, by the way, are new in some Motion predefined templates. They do require you to set up your images in advance. For example, the Drop Zone template with the boxes that all hold part of an image, require you to cut up your image in advance. If you do this without much care and preparation, the results are ugly.

Integrate With Final Cut Pro

Motion tracking and stability is also new. These features analyse a video clip and enable you to improve the rendered result by compensating for the motion, (or by making them worse). Again, although the initial phase of motion tracking and stability correction is easy as cake, doing it so that results are looking natural, is harder. Luckily, all these features are well documented in the PDF manual that comes with the application under the Help menu.

Finally, the Advanced Keyframe Editor is nice, but I for one don’t think Motion compositing pros really need it. Although you can have different types of curves and the editor itself resembles the After Effects editor somewhat, I think that the typical Motion way of doing things delivers enough power for fantastic results. 

Motion 3 is a great compositing and animation tool. With Paint, you can do a lot more than before, and with 3D a whole spectrum of capabilities become available that before were absent from Motion. Not having followed up on competing products such as Combustion, I don’t know if Motion can stand the comparison. I do know it’s pretty powerful. People in the advertising and special effects industry who need more, can always upgrade to Shake, which is simply without competition.

But for mere mortals who don’t need the monstrous power and complexity of Shake, Motion 3 is easy to use and can result in professional-looking compositions with a minimum of effort.