Amazon.com: Apple Motion 2 (Mac DVD): Software

Amazon.com
Unlike your old-school motion graphics system, Motion 2 ushers in a new paradigm, offering true film-quality output, GPU accelerated real-time performance and an astounding tool set that lets you create advanced motion graphics with drag-and-drop ease, startling clarity and unprecedented color fidelity. Motion 2 represents the easiest way for artists and editors to animate text and graphics for DVD motion menus, video or film. It also lets you design in real time and take advantage of GPU acceleration--at true film quality 16-bit and 32-bit float--when it comes time to render your files. That's an industry first.

Motion's intuitive interface works with you, not against you.
We're talking instant gratification here. Motion 2 reacts immediately as you audition its many built-in filters, particles, and title animations. In fact, Motion 2 not only plays back multiple streams of video, filters, text, and particles, it also encourages you to experiment freely, moving or resizing video layers on the fly. Want to try something on for size? Experiment as much as you'd like. Motion 2 caches each layer of your motion graphic independently, so what you see is what you're doing. That very second.

GPU Acceleration
Motion 2 leverages all of the processing capabilities built into the top-of-the-line graphics cards available for the Power Mac G5. It's also the first motion graphics software with GPU-accelerated 16- and 32-bit true film-quality float rendering.

There's more. Motion 2's real-time engine is not just fast. It's scalable. Add more RAM, replace a really good graphics card with an even better one, or upgrade to a new Power Mac G5 with an even faster processor, and you'll notice the results immediately. You'll see faster video playback, increased particle and filter responsiveness, and improved behavior and text layer performance.

32-bit float processing offers incredible detail and quality for all your output needs.
True Film-Quality Output
Of course, Motion 2 delivers absolutely dazzling image quality. It provides not only superb detail and extremely fine color accuracy but eliminates those nasty banding artifacts. Remember, at 16 bits per channel, you have 65,536 luminance levels per Red, Green, or Blue channel to play with in your Motion 2 designs. At 32 bits per channel, that's over 4 billion luminance levels per channel. And because of its built-in support for float processing, you can take advantage of an unprecedented level of dynamic range, retaining detail when you're working with Open EXR High Dynamic Range images and their superwhite pixels.

Not outputting to film? Motion 2 allows you to use 16-bit and 32-bit float processing even when outputting your finished projects as 8-bit or 10-bit QuickTime files. That means your motion graphics will display with superior quality even when your final output is restricted to an 8-bit video environment.

Create behaviors and animations quickly with visual tools.
Drag-and-Drop Creativity
Take behaviors, for example. A form of procedural animation, behaviors let you produce natural, fluid motion simply by dragging a behavior--such as Throw, Fade In/Fade Out, or Gravity--from Motion 2's library and dropping it on the type or graphic you want to animate. Much more accessible than keyframes, not only can behaviors be modified easily and instantly, but they can be combined with one another or with the 500+ filters and particle presets that come with Motion 2. As a result, you can try out many animation variations in a fraction of the time it would take you to painstakingly construct them with keyframes.

Motion 2 offers the same level of sophistication and accessibility for text animation. To get started, simply type the text you wish to animate in Motion's Canvas. Select any font on your system to generate vector-based text that scales, skews and rotates while remaining absolutely sharp. You can animate your text with many of the same parameters--such as position, opacity or rotation--available for other graphics. Or you can apply attributes unique to type, like format, style and layout parameters such as margin, alignment, and justification. With Motion, you can create intricate character-by-character behavior-based animations. You can also place and animate text along a path, selecting either Line or Loop in the path options.

Play It Again, Sam
If dragging behavior and filter parameters with a mouse or stylus isn't fluid enough for you, how would you like to play your motion graphics as if they were musical instruments. Attach a MIDI device to your Mac and you can do just that. With Motion 2, you can use the default Learn mode to assign any number of filters or transform parameters to a MIDI knob, fader or pad. Then, like a jazz musician, you can spontaneously modify your motion graphics in real time, adjusting multiple parameters for color correction or particles at once. Want to demonstrate for clients the range of possibilities available for a project or the different directions in which you could take an assignment? Imagine how Motion 2 can let you illustrate your creative potential.

Keyframing When You Need It
What about those times when your project calls for precise parameter values to be set at specific frames of your animation? That's when it's handy to take advantage of the strengths inherent in keyframe animation, and Motion 2 provides an arsenal of powerful, convenient and intuitive tools for just such projects.

Make your animations more robust with the new Replicator tool.
Replicator
When it comes to animating waves of repeating graphics or movies along a grid or pattern you define, you're going to find Replicator--a new Motion 2 design tool--completely indispensable. Motion provides a library of more than 150 original Replicator presets, letting you easily create everything from video wallpaper to spiral galaxies to lower-third graphic backgrounds.

Using Replicator, you can quickly and fluidly build patterns of repeating elements--shapes, photos, still images, video or just about any object in your project. Once you determine the shape of the pattern, using a grid, spiral or other geometric parameter to define it, you can modify and animate the parameters specific to that pattern anyway you'd like. Change the size of the circle. The twist in a spiral's arms. The speed of rotation. You can also modify and animate the pattern's cell parameters.

Want to try something completely different? Use the Sequence Replicator, a special Replicator behavior, to sequence through parameter changes and create wave-like animations across repeated objects.

Particle Generator
From designing animated backgrounds to generating such real-world effects as smoke, sparkles or fire, Motion 2 makes it easy to create the particle effects so essential to your motion graphics designs.

Consider, for example, that you can use virtually any object in its library--including QuickTime movies--as a particle shape. That you can apply multiple objects to a single particle emitter, thus creating more elaborate effects. Or that you can drag a complete preset particle system into your project--and either use it unaltered or customize its parameters in the Dashboard to better suit your current design needs.

All by itself, the Particle Generator provides you with an astounding tool, but you're also going to want to combine it with others for even more versatility. If, for example, you combine particle system parameters with the power of behaviors, you'll find yourself creating incredibly complex and unique effects nearly impossible to craft in any other way. What's more, you always have the option of tapping Motion's powerful Keyframe Editor and using it to keyframe the particle emitter and particle cells.

Filters and Effects
In Motion's robust library, you'll also find a suite of more than 130 GPU-accelerated filters and effects to use in your projects. Lightning-fast, the accelerated performance of the filters is most evident when you apply Gaussian Blur or one of the stunning Glow filters to a video clip; then interactively adjust the parameters of the assigned filter. Try it. You'll be blown away by Motion's responsiveness and by what you can achieve with PrimatteRT (use it for chroma keying), explosive Light Ray filters, the elegant Vignette filter and more.

Got After Effects-compatible plug-ins? You can use your favorites to modify the behavior of Motion's built-in filters and effects. Or install one of the new third-party filters designed for Motion 2's FxPlug architecture. They'll work just like the filters and effects in Motion's Library and will take advantage of its real-time design engine, delivering accelerated performance, onscreen control and full 32-bit float rendering for outstanding true film-quality resolution.

Intuitive and Powerful Interface
Using Motion's multi-track Timeline, you can insert, overwrite and replace clips with ease. Because we've built basic editing capabilities right into Motion, you don't have to switch applications to perform essential timing tasks. Conveniently, you can trim, slip or slide tracks in the Timeline to have them precisely match animations and effects. You can even view and trim audio tracks quickly and easily in Motion's Timeline.

Motion has the most intuitive control scheme in the biz.
Motion also provides built-in shortcuts called Gestures that make it a breeze to navigate even the most complex projects. Instead of pulling down menus with a mouse or using keyboard combinations, you can make gestural swipes with a pen and tablet to execute any of the more than 30 commands at your disposal. Swipe the pen to the right, for example, and you'll move the animation 10 frames forward; draw a greater-than sign (>) and the Timeline begins playing; swipe down and you'll stop the animation playback.

Dashboard
Another Motion innovation, the Dashboard is a contextual tool that provides the most commonly used parameters for a selected object. While your line-of-sight remains clear and the workspace stays neat and organized, you have all of the tools you need at your fingertips. For behaviors, for example, the Dashboard displays an intuitive graphical control, making it simple and fun to modify animation behaviors. And while the Dashboard suppresses the display of less common parameters, you can always access the full range of controls with a mouse click or pen swipe.

All the tools and files you need are close at hand.
Built-In Convenience
Where might you find the assets and tools you need for your next project? In Motion 2, you're never more than a mouse click or two away from what you need, and you're not distracted by a hodgepodge of floating palettes that get in the way of creativity.

The built-in File Browser lets you easily access and organize such media assets as graphics and QuickTime videos. Similarly, the Library offers immediate access not only to iTunes playlists and iPhoto albums, but also to all of the Behaviors, filters, Particle presets, and Replicator presets you'll use to animate your projects. You'll find the Template Browser equally convenient. There, you'll discover a range of Apple-defined templates for common projects such as broadcast promos and DVD menus. And when you begin creating your own templates, you can save them there, too and organize them into categories that you define.

Works Well with Others
A good corporate citizen, Motion imports a wide range of files, including QuickTime, DVCPRO, HDV, TIFF, layered Photoshop files, Illustrator vector graphics and OpenEXR for 16-bit float quality. Motion also lets you export in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats for creating DVD-compatible files.

You can also work hand-in-hand with Adobe After Effects. Drag and drop your native Motion 2 project files into After Effects 6.5 without rendering. To make a change, simply launch Motion from within After Effects; the changes you make will automatically update in your After Effects composition. And those who normally use After Effects can now easily access the intuitive particle creation, elegant Replicator designs and drag-and-drop procedural animation found in Motion 2.

Motion also lets you use your favorite After Effects-compatible plug-ins for filters and effects. And thanks to a news FxPlug architecture, you can use any of the GPU-accelerated plug-ins that come with Motion 2 or from third-party developers.

Important Member of Final Cut Studio
Because it natively supports HDV, Motion 2 can also play an integral role in a Final Cut Studio solution, allowing a seamless workflow--with no generational quality loss--from Final Cut Pro 5 to Motion 2 to DVD Studio Pro 4.

In fact, Final Cut Studio applications work cohesively together. You can open motion graphics created in Motion directly from Final Cut Pro. And when you edit video or audio tracks in Final Cut Pro, all of your cuts, layering data and motion paths remain intact.

Looking for ease of use? You can drag project files from Motion 2 into DVD Studio Pro 4 without rendering. Use markers in Motion to set chapter markers, transition points and loop points for DVD menus. Not only will DVD Studio Pro render these project files on the fly, but if adjustments are needed, it lets you open Motion and make them right away. No need to export and re-import the files. The graphic automatically updates in DVD Studio Pro without the need to encode or render.

Motion 2 also works seamlessly with Soundtrack Pro and Shake. If you need to modify an audio file, open it in Soundtrack Pro from within Motion. Save it, and the edited audio file automatically updates in Motion 2. Whether the project requires simple sound effects or sophisticated audio repair, Motion 2 provides quick and easy access to Soundtrack Pro's powerful audio repair tools, sound effects library and loops. And you can now send Motion 2 projects directly to Shake to take advantage of its sophisticated compositing effects. Drop Motion projects into Shake without rendering; render 32-bit Open EXR files from Shake to bring stunning film quality back into Motion 2.

Product Description
Apple’s award winning, real-time motion graphics software, Motion is the easiest way for artists and editors to animate text, movies and graphics for film, video or DVD motion menus. Layer animations in real-time while maintaining pristine imagery. Motion 2 is the world’s first motion graphics software with GPU accelerated 32-bit float rendering for true film quality. Explore new design options with Behaviors, Motion 2’s intuitive way to create fluid animations without keyframes. Customize over 100 particle effects like billowing smoke and sparkling pixie dust. Animate wave-like movement that ripples through a grid of images using the new Replicator tool. And if that’s not enough, FXPlug allows 3rd party effects plug-ins to take advantage of Motion 2’s real-time design engine. The designs you create with Motion 2 are unlike what you’ll create anywhere else.