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Over the last several weeks Mac enthusiast George Hazelwood received two direct mail cards and countless emails about a presentation on Motion at the Apple Aspen Grove store in Littleton, Colorado. I went along with George along with a possible switcher to the presentation. I have been very interested in Motion and was thinking about upgrading my poor-mans Mac to a G5. Potential buyers were hanging onto this presentation....
Well, not really.
The presentation began with a very impressive video trailer with Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Shake and Motion. The music and graphics were mesmerizing. I was sold. All they had to do was say, "This is what the G5 can accomplish with this software. Unfortunately that's not what happened...the presenter had to open his mouth. The rest was all down hill. The best word to describe this experience was laughable.
The presenter, let's call him Tom, made comments alluding to the fact that this was the first time he ever used motion was over the previous weekend. Tom must have apologized 14 times throughout the presentation for his inability to get the software to "work correctly." Finding menus, templates, assets, and particles were all beyond Tom's comprehension. We did learn how to drag-and-drop clips and still images into the timeline, but nothing beyond that.
As the presentation continued, several people got out of their seats and walked out. And they didn't just walk out of the presentation; they walked out of the store! After Tom had trouble placing text with a behavior applied to it on top of his video of a surfer that included another effect, he declared the presentation was "over to save face." As far as George and I were concerned it was too late for that.
As the Q and A forum started after Tom finished, one participant asked how many layers you could use in a project, the answer from Tom was, "I don't know." I thought about asking how well Motion would incorporate After Effects plug-ins, but thought better of it. Tom fumbled around his notes, which turned out to be printouts from the Apple website, as more questions were posed about Motion's abilities.
While the presentation went on another store employee was walking around shooting numerous pictures of us listening to Tom. I am sure that these pictures are of our dazed and saddened faces.
Afterwards George made some great comments, "Have someone practice for more than a day with the application before you try and demo it. Also, have something already built prior to the presentation to knock our socks off and then re-create it to demonstrate the power of motion and all its real time abilities. And at least have some knowledge enough to at least look and sound like you know the application."
We speculated that if Steve Jobs had attended this presentation he would have stopped things ten minutes in and fired Tom.
Motion looks like a great tool, on paper. I would love to play around with it. Unfortunately, it won't run on my Mac. has some of Motion's templates available for viewing at that demonstrates the power of this app. Also, having worked with other Apple apps I can say that Motion looks straightforward and easy to use. It's a wonder why Tom had so much trouble with it. I was hoping that this experience would help with a possible review of Motion, but that will have to come from someone else as I am going to wait on buying it.
I would like to thank George Hazelwood for his input with this article.