mFlare for Apple Motion

Hi Gents,

anybody using mFlare yet? I am thinking about doing a review which might not be so positive. :dry:
What are your thoughts?

My finger has hovered over the buy button more than once but something is telling me hold-off. That is mostly the devil on my shoulder that says 'that looks really cool' and the angel that says 'when will you EVER use it?' but I do so like shiny things;) look forward to your review.

It reminds me of optical flares by video copilot. But for motion.. mFlare is kind of weak in FCPX but works well in motion. I have used it to create transitions for FCPX. But that's about all I can get out of it.

Until FCPX supports 3rd party interfaces we won't see it native in FCPX. Which is a bummer. But without a motion tracker it also doesn't work well in video.

Personally I never buy anything unless a client's project needs is, and I include that in what I charge the client (or spread it over several clients). If your clients aren't paying for your stuff, you're losing money. Just a thought...

Ben,

I agree with you completely. Unless you have a practical use for something, you shouldn't buy it. I will say it is a great plugin for motion graphics. I just used it in a looping bluray menu for a dance recital. And the ability to have it track my 3D lights really added a bit of glitz to the menu.

But like I said before it works well in motion, (mainly because of the tracking and lights) but I do hope we see 3rd party interfaces come to fcpx. I miss neat video. It works great in motion 5 but you can't use it in fcpx. (even publishing, doesn't work right). But that's my problem, having to shoot in many low light situations.

I agree with that in a way and then again I don't at all. Should also be my decision to add something extra to a project if the customer request it or not.
Never had a turn down of a project where I enhanced the customers wishes. 90% they dont even know what they want or what is possible. Yup I do have trust in my creativity.
Besides how can you evolve if you don't do anything new. Also could be that the customer gives me allot of freedom.

Anyways back to the topic.
We do have couple After Effects seats with optical flares from VideoCopilot. But since we have Motion on all our workstations 22 that is. Why not give that option to all of them. Is that good? Well kinda it does look good I which there was a way to add your own textures like a dirty lense texture. But the real problem lies in the software itself.
99% of our workstations are on closed certified network to use mFlare you need to activate it on there Internet. So that is one draw back for us. The other is the way licensing works, you have take offline move to another machine and reactivate it with it over the net.
This can be a hassle if you want to move your project on a laptop. We had some crashes (but it is a 1.2 version) and does feel slow and klunky.
Good think we got us one license first for testing. Imagin how our boss would have acted about a 2 grand purchase that we couldn't use? It is really not much but could be a Airbook right?

But it does look cool for a motion plugin and could be the most useful one next to a morphing tool that is still missing in version 5

But if you want to try it, there is a completely full demo free... and this case you learn it and see it's wonderful for you no???