Life as an Artificial Lifeform

Apple today announced that it will be shipping a new professional application called Motion. This application will be aimed soley at After Effects and Combustion Users and will likely have the same impact as Final Cut Express had on Adobe Premiere likely Adobe will stop making an After Effects for the Mac which is Adobes stepchild of the moment anyway (regarding speed and similar things). Especially when Apple markets the Motion app with a $299 price tag compared to a $1000 or $1500 for After Effects Pro. Normally I would welcome a move by Apple that makes things cheaper but this time I have some caution. After Effects has emerged as THE all around tool for compositing in middle and high end Studios as well as THE tool for motion graphics. So one could argue that the interface is clumsy, its not. The keyframe manipulation possibilities inside a timeline have not been duplicated elsewhere, its just lovely but even more important are the plugins (3rd party). There must be 3000 plugins or more for AfterEffects from at least 200 or 300 vendors some of them are NOT available anywhere else achieving looks that are impossible or extremely hard to make with other application. With After Effects gone on the Mac platform there would be zillions of Motion Graphic Designers leaving the platform I can assure, even I would look getting a PC for running After Effects, I just hope Apple did carefully calculate that and made the PlugIn Api for Motion VERY robust and VERY easy to use and port AE plugins over there. And I surely hope this is not another Apple 1.0 version release ridden with bugs and interface failures that almost ALL other 1.0 releases from apple suffer.

On related note Apple is also introducing FinalCutHD (why? didn´t FinalCut already support HD?), DVD StudioPro3 (hmmm a X. release for some feature additions?) and XSAN which is the ONLY real cool announcement that I will not critique. Its a a clustering filesystem to join the filesystems of multiple Xserves (and other macs?).

UPDATE: Adobe has announced After Effects 6.5 priced lower at $699 for standard and $999 for professional. The adressed number one concern: Speed. So getting it all through my head all morning I have to say that apple needs a hell of a job to catch up to the After Effects camp. I hope they do before Adobe axes After Effects. So one other thing of note the After Effects development team is still very much the same as the day before Adobe bought After Effects and very pro mac. So as long as it makes sense for Adobe to produce After Effects I think they will support it for the Mac platform, but still Apple has to be carefull, as nice as an all Apple Hardware/Software platform might be, the graphic user WANTS choice to create their own style otherwise stuff would look the same everywhere pretty soon and After Effects is one of the nicer choices out there.