Frustrated with Motion's instability

I am pretty frustrated with Motion right about now. I understand it has some powerful capabilities (of which currently fulfill all my needs) and is in a relatively infantile state, however.... it is completely useless if it can't do what it should do because of poor performance and bugs. I am glad I'm not importing anything from Motion to FCP because judging from this board, that's a whole other pandora's box of eggshells.
I've read posts here of Motion crashing due to 10.4.3, Decklink desktop settings, ANY image filters, font issues, QT version issues, projects too big, etc... I started off pretty good, but as my project has grown during production, Motion has gotten shakier and shakier. Constant beach balls, random non-responsiveness, crashing with no rhyme or consistent cause... you name it. How can Apple call this a "Pro" app?! I read a post stating that Motion is not meant for anything larger than a few second effect or lower-third graphic... what the **** good is that?
I've tried removing my duplicate fonts, I don't have a decklink card, I deleted preferences, I repaired permissions, I installed (and reinstalled) updates, I changed export settings many times, I am even forced to disable image filters when I'll be working on that section because if that filtered image has to be drawn for the screen, Motion crashes. This is insane. I can't even tell you how many folks have written on here how Motion's problems seriously crimped their tight work deadlines. I'm in the same boat. And quite frankly, I'm very concerned that this project won't get built and rendered in time because of Motion's instability.
I'm beginning to wonder if I should have went with AE instead. This project isn't that hard. If Motion can't handle a 1 minute piece, with 2 short movie clips, and no audio... what can it handle?!
-J

Heya Justin,
Motion has its strengths and weaknesses, but as a motion graphics artist and/or compositor, you'll want to have a few tools in your arsenal. Motion, for example, plays fairly well with AE. You can open Motion projects as QT movies in AE and see automatic updates when you make changes to the projects (in Motion).
Combustion is a great tool, as Patrick pointed out. It has a somewhat long story behind it, but it is considered a direct competitor to AE. Among its strengths: a superior (to AE) 3D implementation, decent particles, awesome keyer, awesome tracker and more.
Nowadays, picking a tool means picking a community. AE has been around for more than a decade and has a userbase in the hundreds of thousands, so there are a lot of resources out there. It's also a bit long in the tooth, on the downward curve of its product lifecycle. Combustion has a much smaller community and Discreet has been slightly fickle about developing it. For a while, it was a major focus for the company, then it went into limbo, then it came back.
Regardless of all that, try familiarizing yourself with some of the other tools on the market. You really can only appreciate each one until you've tried another. And don't be discouraged: time and technology (things get more powerful and ever-cheaper) are on your side.
Good luck!

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sincerely Helge

I found the bug....!!!!
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sincerely Helge
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Does the iOS device connect to other networks?
Does the iOS device see the network?
Any error messages?
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Did the iOS device connect OK before?
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- iOS: Troubleshooting Wi-Fi networks and connections
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- iOS: Recommended settings for Wi-Fi routers and access points
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Apple Retail Store - Genius Bar

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My new iMac with FCPX crashes when rendering complex templates and crashes when exporting with Motion 5

My new iMac with FCPX crashes when rendering complex templates and crashes when exporting with Motion 5
Using Motion 5.0.6 and Final Cut Pro X 10.0.7 on New iMac (December 2012) Mountain Lion,
Intel Core i7 quad-core a 3,4GHz, Turbo Boost fino a 3,9GHz
32GB di SDRAM DDR3 a 1600MHz - 4 x 8GB
Fusion Drive da 3TB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2GB GDDR5
During the rendering of complex FCPX mac crashes and I have to force a restart.
I also happens when I try to export movies with Motion 5.
Does anyone have the same problem with my new iMac?

Problems such as yours are sometimes caused by files that should belong to you but are locked or have wrong permissions. This procedure will check for such files. It makes no changes and therefore will not, in itself, solve your problem.
First, empty the Trash.
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below to select it, then drag or copy it — do not type — into the Terminal window:
find . $TMPDIR.. $ -flags +sappnd,schg,uappnd,uchg -o ! -user $UID -o ! -perm -600 -o -acl $ 2> /dev/null | wc -l
Press return. The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign (“$”) to appear.
The output of this command, on a line directly below what you entered, will be a number such as "35." Please post it in a reply.

How do I make interactive DVD/Blu-Ray menus with motion?

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You can use the "Create After Effects Composition." This prompts you to create an independent version of the Encore PSD menu file, and opens the layered file in AE CC and creates a new composition with appropriate settings. AE no longer has mpeg export, so you export from AE to AME.
There were some workflow options that I did not play with much, but they were never what I saw as the basics for using AE to create the motion background.
You need to understand these two help pages:
Adobe Encore * Menu timing and looping
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/encore/cs/using/WSF49EA5DB-3743-49c2-9831-F66328B192F8.html
Adobe Encore * Using After Effects to enhance menus
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/encore/cs/using/WSA5513911-0AD1-440c-BDAD-2E0E806B425E.html
I'm not sure what you mean by "interactive" unless you just mean creating navigation.

Still image with motion has flicker pulsating problem

I use FCP 5.0.4
I have read the many threads about this subject and am still not able to succeed in getting rid of the flicker/pulsating in a still image with motion.
I would say about 25% of the stills with motion have the jitters; all the rest look great.
The first thing I tried was
Effects:Video Filters:Video:Field Shift:none
as well as
Effects:Video Filters:Video:Flicker Filter min, med, and max.
Maybe 5% were corrected with this, but the other 20% still had the jitters even after using a combination of the above or by themselves.
I just burned a test DVD using a variety of the persistently jittery stills from my current project and although the jitters change a bit, they were still there so all of these failed:
1. Effects:Video Filters:Video:De-interlace Upper (odd)
2. Effects:Video Filters:Video:De-interlace Flicker Filter minimal
3. Effects:Video Filters:Video:De-interlace Flicker Filter max
4. Effects:Video Filters:Color Correction:Broadcast Safe conservative 115
5. Effects:Video Filters:Video:Flicker Filter max
6. All the tricks together which means
Effects:Video Filters:Video:De-interlace set at Upper (odd)
Effects:Video Filters:Video:Flicker Filter max
Effects:Video Filters:Video:Shift Fields: none
Effects:Video Filters:Color Correction:Broadcast Safe conservative 115
I know this issue has been kicked around a lot and i know some folks are not happy that it has to be kicked around at all. But I am doing something wrong because my DVDs look very un-PRO. Would anyone like to talk me through this nightmare preferably with as many details as possible since I am obviously missing something critical.
Thanks in advance.

There is no 'secret formula'. It just takes thinking through the issues.
1. Set the image size for each image that makes sense within the context of your project. Going significantly larger than the displayed area of that image (including movement) is just asking FCP to do additional work to resize the image. FCP is less sophisticated at resizing images than Photoshop. Use Photoshop and your planning of the movie to get the images to the appropriate size.
2. Wasted effort and totally irrelevant- you could set it to 7200 dpi if it makes you feel better.
3. Good idea - be sure to knock down areas of pure or very bright white. These are the elements that will give you the most trouble.
4. Don't do this unless you want to throw away HALF the picture information. Deinterlace deletes half the picture and then photoshop recreates it through interpolation of the remaining half of the picture. Why do this?
5. Make your determination based on what works. If you have properly exposed and sized the material, the need to blur is greatly reduced. ONLY do it on the images that need it. Why degrade every image if you do not need to do so?
6. See number 5
7. Lay out your time line early, view the work on an external broadcast monitor and only mess about with the images that require it.
In the psycho business they have term for much of the referenced post - it's called superstitious behavior. Basically it comes down to "It worked before so we recommend it to everyone without regard to their situation" ... here's another example:
Many years ago in my architecture practice, we had one of the early 512k macs (upgraded from the 128k!) I needed to show one of the interns how to create a project budget spread sheet in Excel. Inadvertently I clicked on Word, said "oops", closed it and opened Excel and we went to work.
A week later I was walking by the computer and overheard the same intern explaining how to work with Excel to another architect. "First you open Word, close it, THEN you open Excel", she explained. When asked by her 'trainee', why do you have to open Word first, wouldn't it just be easier to simply open Excel? Her answer was just perfect, "Well, it works every time, what's wrong with that?" so it goes ...
good luck with your project.
∏

How do I select an image with motion blur so that I can put it onto a different background ?

How do I overlay a image with motion blur on a white background (like the first image) onto a different background (to look like the second image)? any help would be greatly appreciated, many thanks ,ed
Message was edited by: motoredd

I’m afraid you may have bitten off more than you might want to chew.
The resulting pixels of an in-camera-blur combine information about the color/brightness of back- and foreground (edit: the result of surface properties and lighting conditions) with motion (basically transparency for this task) in such a way that it seems exceedingly difficult (maybe even improssible) to isolate the foreground in a »pure« form.
One may get a halfway decent mask (as the backgound is at least almost uniform and brighter than the foreground elements) but you may have to manually decontaminate the transparent areas, otherwise the masked object in front of a dark background would have a bright edge.

Frustrated with Motion's instability

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