Motion GFX

Does anyone here do a lot of Motion GFX?

My curiosity was piqued when a junior artist the other day didn’t feel they could do some simple motiongfx in flame.

Looking at a lot of Motion GFX out there it seems like flame could do a fair bit of it except some of the C4d stuff. Some of the vector graphic stuff might be challenging but possible using gmasks in action.

A lot of the people I know do it in After Effects and C4D. How does this compare?

I suppose I’m looking for example of flame motion gfx to show junior artists.

And I’m dropping a hint/thought/proposal about having maya and flame being a bit more synergistic.

I used to do a lot. AfterEffects took that business away, not because it was better, but because it was cheaper. I don’t think discreet pursued developing any of the tools because AfterEffects was wrapping up the market. They have a LOT of presets for type animation, among other things, that really speed the process up. In my case, I did less and less not so much because of the initial cost, but how much I would be tied up doing revisions when my time could be better spent doing other work that paid much more.

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Flame doesn’t.

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I’ve done tons of work for network promos and depending on the project of course, Flame is often part of the graphics pipeline, at the very end. Almost never with Flame generating the graphics, but often comping and integrating. They’ll send a graphic with alpha from AE or C4D, then ask to “make it look cool” — be it photoreal comping/integration techniques, or adding things like glows, glints, etc.

But for creating text, etc. — practically never.

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My experience is the same. But it just seems so slow having to wait for the after effects op to do revisions. Seems like a waste of time. Especially because I remember doing motion gfx and know how simple it would be to change things.

I digress. We are where we are. After effects has cornered the market.

Vanilla AE is way faster to handle for motion graphics already. But when you add some plugins, like Motion, it becomes simply unbeatable.

I do a lot of my fairly basic motion gfx in Flame, and when thats not enough i can animate some stuff in C4d. I hate AE so try avoid it if possible.

Managed to go 8 years since using AE for anything other than opening and extracting elements from someone elses project.

Agree. While you can do Pizza deliveries with a semi truck, at times a Honda Civic does the trick and turns quicker in the cul-de-sac.

We do a lot of MoGraph in AE. Not only Motion4 but also the MisterHorse plugins (AnimationComposer) can speed it up an order of magnitude. Plus there are lots of templates to draw from (motionarray.com) to save you time. And AE is one of my least favorite apps to use by a mile and a half.

However, it really depends on your overall pipeline. While AE can build MoGraph very fast and well, if you get frequent revisions, it’s a PITA as it means you have to go into AE, modify it, render it, import it, place it. And as you can’t see it on top of the original video track inside AE you have to jump through extra hoops to get the timing right. That can eat up a lot of cycles. It’s a bit better if you edit in Premiere, where you can direct link. But we work in Avid, so those are all manual operations.

We’re working on shifting some of our MoGraph over to BorisFX for that reason, as it can be done inline in all the platforms and hugely speed up revisions for the light to medium stuff. And then build the heavy stuff in whatever platform is most suitable. BorisFX wins on speed, but some of its features, well, they could use a bit of help. Can be frustrating at times. Their keyframing tools take getting used to. And some other basics (like just animating a mask to reveal something) are missing.

So Flame could be a valid use case in a pipeline where MoGraph revisions happen at a time that the material is already/still in Flame.

At the higher level the question is really though - is there ever an app that is best at everything? Has been the chase for everyone. And it doesn’t exist or comes at huge compromise. There’s only so much dev time to go around. We just recently covered that same question re: Particles. MoGraph is ever more important from a style in contemporary content, so even good enough is beyond most platforms now.

Everyone’s mileage differs though.

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I know there are many other tools out there that are inarguably better, but I do TONS of motion graphics in Flame. I have for years and I love it. Obviously there is a familiarity with the toolset…muscle memory…all that, but generally speaking I find I can do QUITE a lot in Flame.
Tons of type. Tons of end tags for the biggest brands you can think of. Again… it’s not the exclusive tool that I use, but it’s the dominant one for sure.

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