I made another title animation in Motion, this time 20 seconds instead of 10. That turned into around 16 hours of work and another 9 or so for export.
The texture I used for the floor and wall came from cgtextures.com, who appear to have a very reasonable terms of service regarding commercial and non-commercial use. The reason it took so long to export was because of the text. Since I wanted the camera to fly in so close to the title I needed the text to render at a very high quality. That takes time. The settings I used also did some hardcore anti-aliasing for object intersections which helped sell the point where the wall and floor met.
To compress for the web I ran it through an iOS droplet I made from Compressor with a data rate of 1Mbps. Any higher and my web host seems to have a problem delivering the video fast enough to iPhones or iPads. The Ogg Theora (Firefox) version was encoded in Terminal with FFMpeg2Theora at 3Mbps. The WebM version was done with Make Web Video, a Firefox extension (also at 3Mbps).
I’ve never spent a ton of time working in Motion. I’ve always assumed After Effects was a superior application for compositing, so trying to become as skilled in Motion as I am (or at least as I think I am) in Final Cut seemed like a waste of time. I recently watched this tutorial by Andrew Kramer and wondered if it was even possible to create those kind of elements within Motion. He, of course, was working in AE.
Turns out you can, more or less. I spent a few hours yesterday poking around in Motion and made a proof-of-concept title animation. This is what it looks like.
Here’s something I worked on recently. Shot with the DVX100a equipped with polarizing and UV filters. Edited in Final Cut Studio and graded using Magic Bullet Looks.
Meagan was invited to speak at Front End 2010 in Oslo, Norway. While we were there I took some pictures. Click on the modern Scandinavian architecture above to view all 106 photos.
Have you ever had a hard time getting an apostrophe while typing on your iPad? Because I have.
Initially I did it the long way by hitting the “.?123″ button. Eventually I realized I could just press and hold the comma / exclamation point button for a slightly faster selection. It still took some time though, and the few seconds it took to bring up the apostrophe was enough to break the flow of typing. But then I discovered a shortcut where an apostrophe appears if you tap the comma / exclamation button and slide your finger up a little before releasing. Tada. Instant apostrophe.
