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Motion Graphics for the Masses

Jun 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Audrey Doyle

New products change the motion graphics equation

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The Bauhaus Movement

Faster, better, cheaper. This mantra is all too familiar to video producers, who know that being able to create sophisticated, compelling content on increasingly tight schedules and budgets is crucial to remaining competitive.

Over the years, software vendors such as Boris FX and Digital Anarchy, among others, have made major inroads in the motion graphics segment of this field by developing products that enable desktop-based video producers — whether at large facilities, small boutiques, or in garages — to produce eye-catching imagery.

Recently, two additional companies have joined the trend to bring high-quality motion graphics tools to the masses. GenArts has ported its high-end Sapphire plug-ins — formerly exclusive to artists working on Discreet and Avid products — to Adobe After Effects and Apple Final Cut Pro, as well as other popular desktop digital editing/effects platforms. And Apple has developed a $299 system dedicated to video producers, both novice and professional, who want to create polished motion graphics quickly, easily, and cost-effectively.

“Our plug-ins are known for enabling users to create sophisticated imagery,” says Karl Sims, president of GenArts. “By porting them to these systems, we're enabling a new group of people to create looks they couldn't create before.”

“We think the motion graphics area will be huge,” adds Richard Kerris, Apple's senior director of pro applications product marketing. “Motion is great for people who have never done motion graphics, and for people who have, but want a product that's very easy to use and afford.”

GenArts has been a premier provider of visual effects plug-ins for the film and video industry since the company formed in 1996. GenArts has one main product, a comprehensive assortment of plug-ins that it sells under the Sapphire brand. The Sapphire plug-ins are designed to extend the capabilities of editing and effects systems by providing users with more than 175 tools for creating more than 200 image processing and synthesis effects. According to the company, the Sapphire plug-ins, which are widely recognized for their unrivaled image quality and their unique organic look, have been used extensively in feature films such as The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix trilogy, Spider-Man, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Initially, GenArts made its plug-ins available for use with Discreet's products, including Flame, Flint, Inferno, and Effect. Then it made them compatible with the Avid AVX products, including DS, Symphony, Media Composer, MC Adrenaline, Xpress/Pro/DV, Nitris, and Newscutter.

In January, GenArts announced it was bringing the Sapphire plug-ins to users of After Effects and compatible products, including Adobe Premiere and Premiere Pro; Apple's Final Cut Pro and Shake; Discreet's Combustion; Eyeon's Digital Fusion; Quantel's generationQ and Synapse; and Media 100's 844/X. According to Sims, the plug-ins also will support Apple Motion. At SIGGRAPH in Booth 1467, GenArts plans to demonstrate its plug-ins on After Effects and Final Cut Pro.

Making the Sapphire plug-ins available to users of these products has had a positive affect on the motion graphics and video effects industry, Sims says. “One thing I've heard is that by enabling people to access our plug-ins from these much broader range, less expensive systems, we're changing the motion graphics landscape.”

Previously, he notes, users had to have a Flame system and spend $10,000 for the Sapphire plug-ins, a setup that was out of reach financially and in terms of skill sets for most video producers. “But now,” Sims says, “for just a few thousand dollars, the motion graphics guy in his garage can afford our plug-ins and have the same tools at his disposal to create sophisticated new looks and beautiful effects.”

Artists on high-end systems such as Flame and Inferno also benefit. “Now these artists can rough out their projects on their Combustions and get a look they can repeat on their Flames,” Sims says. “They're not saying we shouldn't charge so little for the same tools. They're saying great, now we can get this at home. They love that they can previz a look away from the Flame or Inferno suite and make sure they like what they're seeing before they sit down with the client looking over their shoulder.”

The Sapphire plug-ins are resolution independent, include multi-processor support for faster rendering, and run on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Irix. Effects in the package range from everyday tools such as Glow, EdgeRays, LensFlare, Glint, Blur, and RackDefocus, to more exotic effects such as Lightning, FlysEye, JpegDamage, HalfTone, and Textures.

According to Sims, some of the more popular plug-ins include Glow, which creates a haze over the bright parts of an image for a film-like look; and EdgeRays, which generates beams of light coming from behind an object. Other favorites among users are the LensFlare plug-in and the lightning generators — Zap, ZapFrom, and ZapTo.

You can purchase the Sapphire plug-ins as a complete package for $1,699 or as four separate collections. The Lighting collection includes plug-ins for creating glows, lens flares, glints, glares, light beams, drop shadows, and spotlights. Plug-ins for generating edge effects, embossing, film effects and grain, kaleidoscopes, halftones, and other similar looks comprise the Stylize collection. The Adjust, Blur + Sharpen, Composite, and Distort collection consists of plug-ins for creating warping, shaking, and distortion effects, as well as for blurring and sharpening and for adjusting and compositing images. And the Render, Time, and Transitions collection consists of plug-ins for creating lightning zaps, gradients and grids, procedural textures, fractal clouds, and time and flicker effects, as well as for creating dissolve and wipe transitions. Each individual collection sells for $599.

Apple is continuing a trend it began a few years back by developing a desktop application that enables users to deliver professional quality results quickly, intuitively, and inexpensively.

Recipient of the 2004 Award for Innovation in Media (AIM) in the Content Creation category and the 2004 AIM Editors' Choice award in the Content Creation category, Motion joins Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro in Apple's Pro Digital product line. Apple plans to demo Motion at SIGGRAPH in Booth 1401.

“A lot of our Final Cut Pro customers told us they wanted to do motion graphics, but they needed something that was easier to use and produced results more quickly than existing products,” says Kerris, explaining Apple's motivation for developing Motion. “They wanted to do motion graphics in the same way they do video, meaning they wanted to work in realtime and make decisions on-the-fly.

“We built Motion with that community in mind,” he continues. “We wanted to have a product that does for motion graphics what Final Cut Pro does for nonlinear editing and what DVD Studio Pro does for DVD authoring. And we wanted motion graphics creators to use this product as an add-on to their existing environment. We didn't set out to replace anybody.”

Apple reinforced this objective by pricing Motion at $299. Furthermore, by making timelines and keyframes optional, Motion should be accessible and useful to novices and experts alike. Specifically, by focusing on a procedural approach to animation (rather than prioritizing keyframes) Motion opens up efficiencies and ease-of-use that should appeal to editors and others who find traditional animation software cumbersome for motion graphics.

“We know how to bring sophisticated technology to the masses at a price that makes it easy to afford and with a user interface that makes it easy to experiment with,” Kerris says.

According to Kerris, Motion offers several key features for video producers. One is its realtime capability. Motion maximizes the hardware and architecture of the Power Mac G5 and Mac OS X Panther, resulting in realtime, onscreen responsiveness and interactivity.

“We built Motion on what we call the Real-Time Design Engine, which allows everything to be in motion constantly,” Kerris says. “When you're using Motion you feel like you're on a dedicated, high-end system, but you're not — you're on a G5, and you're getting great results.”

Another key feature is Motion's Behaviors, which use procedural animation techniques to create natural simulations, such as gravity and wind, or realistic interaction between multiple objects, such as attraction and repulsion.

According to Kerris, Motion provides four kinds of Behaviors: basic, text, simulation, and parameter. With this feature, novices can generate and modify fluid motion effects, without having to deal with keyframes. Meanwhile, experts who want more control can use Motion's Keyframe Editor to plot precise parameter values at specific frames.

“If you want to learn and play, just drag-and-drop one of more than 40 customizable behaviors onto your text or graphics. If you want more control, just click a button and you get access to all the curves, animation parameters, the timeline — everything becomes revealed,” Kerris says.

A third key feature of Motion is its templates, which were professionally designed for applications including broadcast news, entertainment, event video, corporate presentations, and DVD motion menus. Users can customize the templates, or cut and paste individual elements to build new templates. The templates also provide presets for text styles, gradient colors, and particles for rain, smoke, and fire.

Speaking of particles, Kerris highlights Motion's particle system as yet another key feature. With it, users can make any element a particle, including text. Plus, Motion ships with approximately 100 particle systems — everything from falling leaves to rain, fire, sparkles, and twinkles.

“We felt particles should be realtime,” Kerris says, “We do video in realtime, we should do graphics in realtime, too.”

Besides these features, Motion also enables users to import Photoshop layers with blend modes and transparency, and animate text on a path and change the path interactively. Furthermore, Motion comes with more than 90 accelerated filters, including familiar types such as Gaussian blurs, distortion effects, and glows, as well as more exotic filters such as kaleidoscope and tunnel, all of which users can just drag-and-drop onto an object. Motion also includes the Photron PrimatteRT keyer for creating blue- and greenscreen effects.

Although Motion can be used on its own, it also integrates with Final Cut Pro HD and DVD Studio Pro. For instance, cuts, layers, blend modes, and motion paths created in Final Cut Pro HD are editable in Motion's timeline, and Motion titles, animation, and effects automatically update in the Final Cut Pro HD timeline. This eliminates the need to render interim files in either direction until the user is ready to play out to tape.

To author a title on DVD, users drag-and-drop Motion projects into DVD Studio Pro 3, which automatically detects and encodes the source media to the MPEG-2 format in the background. Users can add titles, transitions, camera angles, subtitles, or slide shows without stopping to render interim files. When finished, they can burn the title to DLT for replication and archive or burn it to virtually any DVD disk format. Motion also integrates with Apple's Shake 3.5, Soundtrack, and Logic Pro 6 software. (For additional specifics on features and workflow for Motion, see Bob Turner's column on page 35.)

All told, GenArts and Apple feel their products will change the way video producers create motion graphics. “With Final Cut Pro, we changed the way people do video editing, and today we have more than 250,000 Final Cut Pro customers,” Kerris concludes. “We think we'll get those kinds of numbers with Motion, too.”

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Sidebar

The Bauhaus Movement

VIDEO PRODUCERS GENERATING MOTION GRAPHICS HAVE new choices for developing workflow and efficiencies. Bauhaus Software's Mirage wraps motion graphics capabilities into a more comprehensive package that suggests a very different — and potentially useful — workflow. Designed for resolutions ranging from HDTV and film to web video, Mirage integrates realtime video paint, animation, and effects functions, and can be used with packages such as Final Cut Pro and Shake as part of a seamless pipeline for animation and video production.

According to Bauhaus, broadcasters can use the video tools in Mirage, including color correction, histogram controls, keying with spill suppression and matte controls, and multi-point pixel tracking/stabilization, to create and animate motion graphics. Video producers can use the software to manipulate, enhance, and create effects for HDTV and film. (The software even has a place in the cartoon animator's toolbox. According to Bauhaus, these users can sidestep traditional scan/ink/paint workflows and instead work from digital pencil tests to final product within a single unified environment.)

Available for Mac OS X and Windows, Mirage also includes RotoTracking tools for tracking and effecting elements from animation and video layers, and graphical timing adjustment tools for ease-in/ease-out. Plus, users can combine different file types, media, and resolutions in the same project. Bauhaus will be demonstrating Mirage to the general public in several of its partner booths at SIGGRAPH. It will also have a private suite on the show floor for press and other private demos. For more information, visit www.siggraph.org/s2004.

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