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by Martin Fowler.
Original Post: Bliki: MotionGraphics
Feed Title: Martin Fowler's Bliki
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Feed Description: A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development
As I've been using slides again as a visual channel in my talks,
I've been making use of animation with diagrams to help communicate
my points. The major presentation programs (Keynote and Powerpoint)
have long supported animation, but I've been inclinded to look for
motion grahics tools that are more powerful and easier to use.
The two main ones that come up in my searching are Adobe's After
Effects and Apple's Motion. Both tools are very capabable, but also
very expensive: effectively costing about $1000. I got hold of a
trial version of After Effects which was a good way to get a feel
for it. Infuriatingly I can't do the same with Motion since Apple don't
provide trial versions of their software.
One of the directions I was interested in persuing was making use
of 3 dimensions. This led me to experiment with Blender, which is a
open-source 3D modeling and animation tool. I ran into two main
problems, which made it much slower to work with than After
Effects. Firstly thinking in 3D is more difficult, and I'm not sure
the results are usually worth the extra effort involved. Secondly
the UI for blender is very idiosyncratic, which made it
frustratingly difficult to do even simple things.
One of the frustrations for me here is that all the tools I've
been looking at so far do lots of things that I'm not so interested in,
which makes it harder to use them for my main purpose.
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