About halfway through my work today, Motion started to slow to a crawl. Even when I turned off the rendering of every single object in the scene, there were some areas that inexplicably played at five frames per second. Half the time the audio would come out garbled and choppy, making it difficult to tell whether anything I was doing was syncing up properly.
I imagine that this is because I have over 3000 frames of animation occurring from multiple camera angles with several different audio clips in one single project file. This is a different approach from the one I took with the very first scene I animated, in which I created different project files for each “shot”. Unfortunately, that meant if I tweaked a piece of the background in one project, I’d have to go back to all the others and make the same change. Oh, and also that didn’t do jack shit to prevent Motion from behaving like a snail. Anyway, I was hoping that I’d just be able to animate the entire scene in one project file, render each camera angle separately, and not have to deal with any hassle.
In fact, I’m even animating the characters in a separate project file from the 3D background. The walls, windows, and city graphics are in a completely different project this time.
And yet, despite my best efforts, Motion still manages to choke. Dear god. I may not have the most state-of-the-art hardware, but really? I’m not even doing anything all that complicated. What a terribly optimized piece of software.
As a consequence, I wasn’t able to make up for yesterday’s lack of productivity, and could only eke out another script page’s worth today.
I think I only have one page to go, but I have some things I need to take care of tomorrow that will limit my working hours. Perhaps this scene won’t be finished this week.
In any case, I’ll use a new project file for the remainder of this scene.
Apple Motion is GPU-Accelerated, and Other Lies
Well, apparently I was wrong that Apple Motion has no idea what a GPU is. According to Wikipedia:
And Apple confirms this on the product page. Okay, I stand corrected. Motion is, in fact, GPU-accelerated, in the same way that a car is accelerated by blowing on the rear bumper.
Or, perhaps it’s GPU-accelerated in the same way that the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV is GPU-accelerated. In other words, actually isn’t.
My MacBook Pro may be three years old, but it can run fucking Crysis at 30 frames per second. Here’s what happens when I play one of my Motion projects when there is literally nothing on screen, and every element that would normally be visible from this camera angle is disabled:
(Magenta is my background color, which means nothing’s there)
Seven. Frames. Per. Second.
Of nothing happening. Except for audio, but that can’t (or shouldn’t) be using that much processing power.
Again, I don’t have a state-of-the-art system. I shouldn’t need a state of the art system to get a decent framerate of nothing happening.
In any case, I’m still working on YFIAS. I finished the penultimate conference room scene last Wednesday, and wasn’t able to work Thanksgiving or the day after. Today I started the last conference room scene, and once that’s done I will finally be out of that god damn conference room.