Harrington appreciates the easy integration between Motion and Final Cut Pro. “We get great video editing and graphics support with Final Cut Pro, so we’re excited to see Motion work really well with it,” he says. “It’s nice to be able to start editing in Final Cut Pro, get our video tracks set and then use the round trip feature to take a Final Cut Pro timeline and import it into Motion with all its clips and layers preserved.”

He continues, “We can also drop a Motion project into our Final Cut Pro timeline and render it there. If we want to make changes, we can open an editor, fix something, render it, and we’re ready to go. We love being able to jump back and forth between applications very fast.”

“Motion removes the hardest and most boring parts of motion graphics work and makes it intuitive and exciting. You can focus on the creative part while Motion figures out the math.”

The ease and convenience are especially valuable to Harrington on the road. “I travel a lot so I took ‘Soulmates’ with me and pulled out my laptop whenever I had a bit of time,” he explains. “I’d take my shots and the original rock song we had for the soundtrack, and it was easy to edit to the music. I could see all my audio waveforms and take advantage of Final Cut Pro’s superior trimming ability to slip and slide and exactly hit those musical beats that are so critical to great motion graphics. I did all that with great speed and flexibility on my PowerBook.”

Built for Speed

“The render times were incredibly fast,” says a satisfied Harrington. “Motion is the fastest piece of software we’ve ever used on a Mac for a 2.5D project [working with 2D objects in a 3D-type space]. Motion was outstanding because we got very fast feedback, so it was easy to experiment with different types of animation.”

Speed is a topic Harrington parses like the pro he is. “At times we achieved real-time performance,” he says. “And at other times we didn’t expect to — it’s unrealistic to expect real-time HD resolution when you’re working with 30 layers.”

To his mind that’s not a shortcoming. On the contrary, Harrington feels that real-time rendering may be overemphasized. “Motion is packed it with these nicely designed built-in templates that showcase the things it can do really fast,” he says. But “there’s so much more Motion can do, and it’s not necessarily all in real-time, but they’re fantastic effects.”

A New Way of Working

The application offers, he says, “a whole different model that changes our view of motion graphics. It’s a brand new way of doing things, where you can get this organic flowing movement. When you look at it together with the other things Apple is doing, like Core Video, you see how Apple is adding this excitement back into our work. It forces you to think and try new things.”

Harrington welcomes the challenge. “Motion removes the hardest and most boring parts of motion graphics work and makes it intuitive and exciting. You can focus on the creative part while Motion figures out the math. Or if you need to access all the nerdy stuff, you can do a control-click and get to it.”

Given the diversity of talents and backgrounds in his shop, says Harrington, “the reason why Apple is our primary technology is that the tools are not exclusively for people with a certain type of training. A video producer like me doesn’t have to be afraid to sit down and edit with a new tool. And an artist doesn’t have to worry about being thrown into a motion graphics package. That’s the thing about Apple — the products are rock solid and they try to make sure everyone has a good user experience.”

Drilling into Motion

Harrington has thought carefully about how new applications like Motion become part of a standard toolkit. “Motion is not meant to replace what you have now, but to supplement it,” he says. “It’s an incredibly deep program, although you wouldn’t necessarily know that when you first open it.”

As Harrington and his team exercised their new tool, they found it not only sexy but practical, offering benefits for both the artist and the businessperson. Or as Harrington, who wears both hats, puts it, “Motion won on quality, speed and the third point of that famous triangle: cost. We produced results that we’re both proud of and excited about. And the things we discovered we’ll use for our Fortune 500 clients, too.”