After Effects or Apple Motion?

Folks,
I know I'll get a lot of pro-After Effects comments here, but I'm trying to figure out which is better. I also know that there are differences that make it much like comparing apples (pardon the pun) to oranges, but I'd still like some opinions.
The reason for this is that I can only afford to upgrade to either Final Cut Pro Suite or the Adobe Video Suite. I currently use Final Cut Pro but would not be adverse to changing to Premiere.
Thanks,
Lloyd

>I know I'll get a lot of pro-After Effects comments here, but I'm
>trying to figure out which is better.
Ah yes, the old, but wrong question that a pro should never ask. Depending on your workflows, neither is "better". Both have their merits and ideally you are in the best position when you have the opportunity to use them combined. However, it should be duely noted that even people, who use FCP and Motion on a daily basis, feel that they can't do without AE.
Most obviously Motion begins to feel rather slow and uncomfortable with a certain complexity in your projects, which can be attributed to it being totally and completely aimed at using hardware accelleration and having little or no fallback measures. On the other hand it has some nice particle and behavior stuff which AE can't compete with. Also roundtripping is of course quite evolved.
AE's failings mostly lie in using hardware resources inefficiently and being quite touchy in terms of non-optimally configured environments. In other areas it beats Motion in terms of flexibility, even though arguably some of the tools still look weak compared to even more sophisticated programs. For instance many of the artists I was mentioning earlier still prefer AE's 3D to that of motion for the single reson of it having shadows...
Well, anyway, get the tool you feel most comfortable with. If you're more of an editor rather than a motiongraphics/ effects guy, probably updating FCP and getting Color along with it will be more valuable to you than a newer version of AE. If it's the other way around and you are looking for certain workflows that would require Shape Layers, 32bit processing, Puppet Tool or you already have a lot of AE plugins which you want to make better use of, than updating Ae would probably be smarter.
Mylenium

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a

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Dr. PieArson,
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http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/demonfacewarp/
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Trace Burroughs
LMENSTUDIO(at)aol.com

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http://www.adobe.com/devnet/aftereffects.html
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thanks
Mac OS X (10.4.9)

hi
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hope that helps
Rounik

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I have previously used it for high quality slow motion using the pixel motion option in PPro CS4. Heres what I do.
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This is in reply to OP J Maggs and RustedX:
Hey guys I feel your pain. I am taking the time to reply just because I had the SAME problem and researched all over the internet and wasn't available to find much specifically about my case which it seems to be EXACTLY what happens/ed to RustedX.
I've got a 16 seconds clip, shot with a Canon 7D at 1280x720 60fps. I wanted to slow it down to 5% with After Effects CS4's Timewarp. So, because I tried the same effect with Apple Motion (with success), I knew the new time of the clip was going to be 5:30 minutes long. So I changed my comp time from 16 seconds to 5:30 minutes. I dropped the clip in to my comp timeline (which showed me a little 16 seconds clip into my 5:30 minutes comp) and applied the Timewarp effect to my new layer. It did slowed it down but still the clip on the layer was at 5% but only for 16 seconds. Meaning it should had been a 5:30 minutes clip, but stayed slowed down at 5% for only 16 seconds. So, I sent to render because I thought 4gb or ram probably wasn't enough or something, and it came out a nice 5:30 minutes long clip with 16 seconds of slow motion at 5% and the rest of the clip is completely black.
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I selected my layer with the clip on my timeline, and I right clicked on the layer not the comp and selected Time -> Enable Time Remapping
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I hope some one can add to this... Dose no one use After Effects to build motion menus?
I got a little farther in my problem, I took my comps that are made in NTSC D1 Widescreen SQ Pixels
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzCCfkQKBwE

HELP: My Videohive After Effects project is rendering artifacts! AE CS6

Hi all,
HP-HPE 510t
i7 2600 @ 3.4GHz
16GB Ram
Windows 8 x64bit
Nvidia GTX 660 Ti
I purchased a Videohive After Effects project with motion gfx and video, and it is rendering artifacts in two places.
I'm exporting Quicktime + animation, tried + PNG, and + photo jpeg but all with the same results.
I even contacted the author but he cannot explain why either. The interesting thing is, it renders beautifully without any artifacts in AE.
Only on the export render do I see the black silhouette artifacts. Below are some photos of what I mean.
Please help? i'm trying to export the highest quality for youtube and am going to H.264 the lossless version.
It looks correct in AE:
[URL=http://s10.photobucket.com/user/mystickid/media/ItisworkingcorrectlyinAE.png.html][IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a135/mystickid/ItisworkingcorrectlyinAE.png[/IMG][/URL]
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[URL=http://s10.photobucket.com/user/mystickid/media/promoartifact2.png.html][IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a135/mystickid/promoartifact2.png[/IMG][/URL]
[URL=http://s10.photobucket.com/user/mystickid/media/promoartifact3.png.html][IMG]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a135/mystickid/promoartifact3.png[/IMG][/URL]
http://s10.photobucket.com/user/mystickid/media/promoartifact1.png.html

Thank Rick,
Only reason that I'm using photobucket instead of the built-in image embeddor (camera icon), is because it doesn't seem to be working for me. All I get is an empty dialog box, tried also with video but that one seems to be working properly.
maybe ill try firefox.
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2) Quicktime + photo jpg
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Help!

After Effects & Premiere

After Effects n00b here. Seeking to learn and improve. But at the outset of my journey I have some confusion, already.
Just like Illustrator and InDesign have functionality overlap, so do After Effects and Premiere. So, I ask:
How do they compliment each other? How does one decide to designate certain tasks for one or the other, when they both handle video and animation?

> You can "create motion graphics, apply visual effects, composite visual elements, perform color correction," etc in Premiere. Can you not???
Not easily or well. (Actually, the color correction tools in Premiere Pro are coming along, so that one might be a "yes".)
> but marketing verbiage aside, I'm really seeking the experience-based thoughts and opinions of my peers - the ones who actually use the software professionally, day-in day-out.
That's not "marketing verbiage"; that's a summary of the applications written by someone who has been using both full-time for about 10 years now (me, as it happens, since a long time ago I wrote the After Effects documentation).
Here's another way of answering the question:
Use Premiere Pro to take movies, cut them apart into shorter pieces, and arrange them in time.
Use After Effects to layer many pieces of movies and other animated images (created in After Effects or imported from elsewhere) on top of each other to create composite images.
Premiere Pro is optimized for arranging movies in time. After Effects is optimized for changing the way movies look.
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After Effects or Apple Motion?

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