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Hey all,

I wouldn't call myself a beginner in Motion 5, but I'm having a difficult time smoothing my camera moves in my mO2 animations. I've been using "ease both"in the keyframe editor, but still, there is no easement. I'm looking at my keyframe lines, and I don't see why the camera moves so jerky. Maybe it's not motion, but mO2's issue? Or maybe I'm missing something entirely.

FCP.CO is great. Your input is appreciated. Thank you.

Your expertise in Motion has nothing to do with using mO2, because mO2 uses its own engine, its own workflow and only uses Motion as a GUI. It won't use Motion native keyframes or behaviors. You have to keyframe inside of mO2. So the Motion keyframe editor has nothing to do with mO2. mO2's camera is very smooth, you're probably seeing playback issues. Export it as a file and play it, you'll see it's smooth.

I strongly recommend you join the mO2 users group on Facebook, you'll learn the most there. It can get a little elitist and overly fanboy-ish (as most FB user groups do), but there's great information there.
www.facebook.com/groups/473820736437358/

But before anything else, refer to the user manual and MotionVFX's own tutorial videos.
www.motionvfx.com/mO2/Manual/index.html
and
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBrUm2lGe...cAO_9xqif0BivGnC-UAa

Ben, thanks for the tip on the FB group. I have now requested to join. I enjoyed your FCPX audio presentations during 2017 NAB btw.

I received a response with an interesting point from my inquiry to the MotionVFX support team, and I will quote the it below.

"Please note that there’s a bug in Apple’s FxPlug that prevents Motion 5 from sending the correct keyframe interpolation data to any plugin (not only mO2).
Only Linear and Bezier interpolation works properly so these two are the only ones that are supported by mO2 - using the "Ease" option converts the keyframe to the "custom" interpolation that messes the entire animation up."

Best regards,
Feral

A bit related, has this anything to do witth the fact that we can’t use the composition native camera to drive the internal camera? I’m looking to make the jump to FCPX/Motion from AE and while I don’t mind still doing some shots in AE, having bumped into mO2 plugin as the Element 3D replacement is great.
However, one of the main drawbacks I see is that we can’t use a composition’s camera in the same way an After Effects camera layer can feed the view for the Element3D layers.

What do you mean by "internal camera" and "native camera"? I don't know what this refers to.

I'd have to see an example, I don't know Element3D and have no clue what it does. What does the Element3D camera do that is special?

My bad, I still don’t have the vocabulary and now I’m making up names, let me backtrack a bit (excuse if I go too obvious especially the first point, it’s for setup)
- After Effects has the concept of 3D Layers (a plane layer that can be rotated and translated on all x,y,z axes) and the concept of ‘camera layer’ (pretty sure/hope Motion has all of this).
- A camera layer can move, rotate, change field of view, focus point, etc and affects how all 3D Layers on the camera layer’s timerange look. Many ‘camera layers’ can be added to a single composition(*) with different start-end points staggered to make camera cuts.
- Now, Element3D(**), is for our practical purposes basically the mO2 of after effects. It can load models, 3D scenes, lights, add shadows, bloom, chromatic aberration and all that inside the plugin. But It extends upon the previous concepts too, where a ‘camera layer’ can drive the ‘internal Element3D camera’ view. Meaning that you can create a layer (or many), add Element3D plugins to them, set up your 3D objects, scenery, etc in them and then drive the whole animation for all the layers from outside the plugin with an AfterEffect’s ‘normal camera layer’. It goes even further, you can make 3D layers (and/or 3D null layers) drive the position/rotation/scale of specific objects that live inside the plugin. Allowing to combine Element3D with normal 3D text layers and the rest of after effects basically, including other plugins that might do the same such as Optical Flares (also from the Element3D creator) for having 3D flares, 3D scene and default 3D layers all synced together.

Maybe Motion has other better approaches to the same use, but I was trying to find if there’s anything regarding the mO2’s camera being isolated and constrained to the plugin context (for example, this post mentions the strict use of Motion as only it’s GUI and the rest resides inside the plugin... including keyframes).

Thanks a lot in advance, I’ll have to start using and hitting the roadblocks on my own first probably, will wait for the desktop to arrive and get on that.

*Composition: it is a group of layer types (sound, null, camera, etc layers) all grouped and composited together under a global start-end time range, resolution size and other settings... a composition can be rendered as an output file or used as a layer on another composition as if it were just any other layer. Also, a parent comp layer can make it’s children comp layer’s cameras be overridden by the parent’s camera (and many other overrides possible with expressions, links of all sorts, etc). This is probably way out of the scope of the question, but to give a bit of a background.

**Element3D is a plugin made by Andrew Kramer of videocopilot.net fame (really happy for the possibility of an equivalent, mO2). It can load 3D models, uses physically based materials (but not quite roughness/metalness a la substance designer sadly which seems to be what mO2 translates), array replicators, plus a myriad of nooks and knobs that I’ll have yet to see if there’s a counterpart in mO2.
On videocopilot.net there’s also another plugin, Optical Flares (with an amazing flare tool editor for doing custom flares from the very start) and at a first glance it totally looks like mFlares plugin... it looks like MotionVFX and VideoCopilot have either been checking each other closely, feeding each other or something because I’m starting to see quite some similarities (in this case there are others too though, like Knoll Light Factory).

OK, let's clear some things up. First, do NOT try to apply AE concepts and workflows to Motion, or you'll get confused. The two work differently, different tools, different workflows.

Natively, Motion has cameras, that simply work like real-world cameras. There's no magical "layer" thing that affects other layers. It's a camera, just use it like you'd use a real-world camera.

mO2 is a very sophisticated plugin that uses its own render engine. It only uses the GUI from Motion. Motion cameras and behaviors and filters don't work inside of mO2. Think of it as a separate app running inside of Motion's GUI.

mO2's cameras work very much like Motion's native cameras do. You just use it as a real-world camera. There's not hocus-pocus that affects other "layers" or objects. What you see through the camera lens is what you see through the camera lens.

I also strongly suggest reading the mO2 user manual and joining the mO2 Users Group" on Facebook. Tons of mO2 specific advice and tips and tutorials there.

Here is a mO2 recourse page I created. It has links to, among other things, the user manual and the FB group.
finalcutprox.guru/tutorials/tutorials/mO2resources.html

Hi, did you ever find out how to smooth the camera movements in the MO2 plugin? Nothing seems to work, the guys here saying it renders ok are wrong?