Commotion Pro 4.1 for the Mac

Do you remember when Commotion, then from Puffin Designs, first hit the Mac scene a few years back? A lot of us hadn't seen anything like it, at least any desktop application like it. Provided you had enough cash to get yourself a copy and plenty of RAM to load your footage into (and RAM was some major cash back then), you could have a serious, quasi-real-time, high-end compositing package right there on your Mac. Times are a tad different now. RAM sure is a heck of a lot cheaper, and so is Commotion Pro, now owned by Pinnacle Systems and currently standing at version 4.1. And if I didn't know any better, I could swear that Pinnacle Systems is quietly trying to muscle in on After Effects' traditional motion graphics turf, in addition to retaining the signature high-end painting and rotoscoping features Commotion has had all along.

What It Does

I go way back with Photoshop and the After Effects Production Bundle, so naturally I was curious about what Commotion Pro would offer to a long-time Adobe stalwart. Let me put it this way: if you can imagine smushing Photoshop and After Effects together into a single, integrated program (and with just a dash of Illustrator thrown in for good measure), then you can begin to have an idea of what Commotion Pro can do. The fast answer, though, as to what Commotion Pro 4.1 does is this top ten list:

1. It still has an excellent implementation of RAM-based playback.
2. It paints on video footage.
3. It has myriad tools for making rotoscoping easier, and in some cases, automatic.
4. It has really, really outstanding motion tracking capabilities.
5. It contains advanced keying features and masking options, including Primatte Keyer.
6. It can create layered compositions and motion graphics.
7. It ships with a lot of excellent plug-ins.
8. It has one-and-a-half really cool Mac-only features.
9. It now runs natively on Mac OS X.
10. It stays crunchy, even in milk.

Before we go down the list in detail, let's start with the interface. Pinnacle Systems has a pretty good idea of where its users are probably coming from, because if you're at all familiar with the aforementioned Adobe products, you will feel quite comfortable in Commotion Pro from the giddy-up. Icons, keyboard shortcuts, interface conventions, almost every part of Commotion Pro should feel familiar to Adobe users (fig. 1). Now, on to the list:

Figure 1: The Commotion Pro 4.1 program running natively in OS X.

1) It still has an excellent implementation of RAM-based playback.

I found Commotion Pro's RAM playback engine to be much more powerful and flexible than After Effects' version. The most direct way is to invoke Commotion Pro's Load Clip panel (fig. 2), which in addition to letting you specify which frames of a clip to load into RAM, offers a bunch of other options like proxies and footage interpretation to get just what you need when you need it. Once the clip is in the project, you can load different sections into RAM by setting a range in the clip and then loading the specific frames. The workflow is very smooth and highly functional, making what could be a tedious process of loading and unloading frames a relatively pain-free endeavor.

Figure 2: The Load Clip panel, it all its glory.

Even better, if you're one of those lucky folks that have a super-fast RAID drive setup, you can forego the RAM playback entirely and play uncompressed source footage directly from your disk through the SuperCache feature.

2) It paints on video footage.

Painting is one of Commotion Pro's original and signature features, and still a strong selling point now that it's at version 4.1. The first glance I took at the Paint toolbar (fig. 3), I had to do a double-take. I thought I was in the wrong program, if you get my meaning. And like the other program I was thinking of, you have many of the same tools, and those tools are even accessible through the same keyboard shortcuts in many cases. The difference here is that you can use any of these standard tools on moving images (and even on a blank multi-frame canvas, if you want). An onion-skinning mode (fig. 4) helps you out with painting over multiple frames, and you have a ton of brushes to choose from when you paint. There is even a nifty class of brushes called FX Brushes, which emulate paint strokes, odd shapes, and real-world objects as brushes that follow your paint strokes (fig. 5).

Figure 3: Hmm...I could swear I've seen this tool palette somewhere before.

Figure 4: Onion Skinning lets you see multiple frames at once to ease the painting process.

Figure 5: Candy, anyone? A tasty sampling of some of Commotion Pro's FX Brushes.

3) It has myriad tools for making rotoscoping easier, and in some cases, automatic.

The term "rotoscoping" has more or less become a shorter way of saying "that really tedious process of touching up pieces of footage on a frame-by-frame basis." Commotion Pro takes away some of that tedium by offering several ways of simplifying the process, and in some cases fully automates it. Here are a couple examples of what I mean:

Autopainting. You can actually record a paint stroke and apply it over the length of a sequence of frames, or apply the same stroke on every frame of a sequence (fig. 6). And Commotion Pro allows you to paint with an undo buffer, clone tool, or any other paint feature, so Autopainting is a very powerful addition.

Figure 6: All the power of Autopaint lies in these tiny little buttons.

SuperClone (fig. 7). The SuperClone tool lets you expand the regular cloning tool to encompass different clips, and even different frames and xy coordinates from those different clips. So, for example, you could use the SuperClone tool to paint the image of your protagonist's head onto a clean background plate to create a floating head. Spooky!

Figure 7: The SuperClone tool lets you clone from multiple sources.

Wire removal. Commotion Pro has its very own dedicated wire removal tool to simplify and automate, you guessed it, the removal of wires or cables from source footage.

4) It has really, really outstanding motion tracking capabilities.

Commotion Pro takes the pretty advanced concept of motion tracking and simplifies it to the point where it's immediately useful, but doesn't lack in power for the advanced user. Commotion Pro's motion tracking (fig. 8) can be as simple as placing the target on the point you want to track and then clicking "Track." Some of the time, this is all you need to do. But as this is an imperfect world, Commotion Pro offers many ways to get the most precise tracking data possible (fig. 9). Even after you do an initial track, you can pick up where the tracking goes astray and fine-tune the parameters, allowing you to discard inaccurate portions of the track until you get a good result.

Figure 8: A couple of motion tracks sitting in their host clip.

Figure 9: Just look at all those motion tracking options.

Once you have the tracks you want, you can use that data in a ton of ways. The data can be applied to a rotospline, help you lock down foreground footage to the movement of background footage, put a virtual billboard on a moving sign, etc. You get the idea. And for the After Effects users out there, Commotion Pro can export out this data for use in After Effects as well.

5) It contains advanced keying features and masking options, including Primatte Keyer.

One of the most frustrating things in the video universe is trying to generate a clean alpha channel from footage where a foreground object is moving, but needs to be separated from the background. Or, even worse, trying to get a clean key from bluescreen or greenscreen shots that were poorly lit and contain a lot of junk to clean up. Commotion Pro has you covered if you happen to receive either kind of nasty footage. Commotion Pro offers up masking through Rotosplines, which are powerful, vector-based, keyframable masks. Using Rotosplines, you can draw out masks using either familiar Bezier splines or the simpler, but no less powerful, B-splines (fig. 10). You can then keyframe the resulting splines over time, or add motion tracking data as appropriate. For footage that needs to be chromakeyed, there are a ton of plug-ins for handling blue screen, green screen, almost-but-not-quite-blue screen, spill removal, and many more (fig. 11). And as if those weren't enough, Pinnacle Systems has included the 800 lb. gorilla of chroma key programs, Primatte Keyer (Get it? 800 lb. gorilla? Primatte? Never mind). I could go into several more paragraphs about the power of Primatte Keyer, but suffice it to say that it alone is almost worth the price of Commotion Pro.

Figure 10: Rotosplines offer you two, two, two different kinds of splines.

Figure 11: All these plug-ins exist solely to help you get a clean matte from chromakey shoots.

Once you have your properly masked your footage, Commotion Pro's compositing plug-ins can take it a step further. For example, you can use the Composite Color Matcher plug-in to adjust the color of the overlay footage to match the hues and saturations present in the background plate. If the background plate is heavily backlit, you can add Light Wrap, which takes color from the background plate and wraps it around the edges of the foreground image to enhance the reality of the composite. It's this extra compositing stuff that really sets Commotion Pro apart.

6) It can create layered compositions and motion graphics.

Frankly, I don't go back long enough with Commotion Pro to know when exactly it added compositions, but again, if you're at all familiar with After Effects, Commotion Pro's timeline is very easy to pick up (fig. 12). And it does a lot of the things you would expect, like track mattes, transfer modes, straightforward keyframing, a curve editor, etc. It doesn't have the 3D capacity that After Effects does, but if you need middle-of-the-road motion graphics abilities without wanting to switch programs, Commotion Pro's timeline will probably serve you just fine.

Figure 12: Commotion Pro's timeline. To some of you, it may look a bit familiar...

7) It ships with a lot of excellent plug-ins.

In addition to the kinds of plug-ins you might expect a program like Commotion Pro to have (color correction, distortion, text effects, blurs, etc.), there are a few cool ones thrown in as well. I'll just do a little name dropping here and leave it at that:

• Knoll Light Factory (fig. 13), which adds lens flare effects.
• Fractal Fire (fig. 14), a pretty neat little cloud rendering algorithm.
• Real Shadows (fig. 15), which does just what the name implies.

Figure 13: Knoll Light Factory LE added the sun to this shot of San Francisco.

Figure 14: Pyromaniacs, rejoice! Fractal Fire, as the name suggests, can make fire (along with other fractal cloud stuff)!

Figure 15: Real Shadows add perspective and falloff to object shadows, like on Mr. Ducky here.

Of course, there are a bunch more, but I just wanted to illustrate that Pinnacle Systems isn't skimping one bit in the plug-in department.

8) It has one-and-a-half really cool Mac-only features.

We'll give the other half of one of the cool features to the PC version, which theoretically can do the same thing. What am I talking about? Commotion Pro has the ability to output a DV signal (or some other hardware-assisted signal) on the fly, in either NTSC or PAL (fig. 16). Since all recent Macs have FireWire ports built-in, all you would need is a DV to Analog converter (such as a DV camera) to view the output on a video monitor as you work. Very cool. This feature doesn't seem to work through the FireWire port on PCs, but other PC-based hardware options are available to enable this capability.

Figure 16: Got a FireWire port? Then you got live previewing!

The really cool, and really Mac-only feature, is G4-optimized motion tracking. When you set up a track, G4 owners will have a choice between software-only tracking and G4-assisted tracking (fig. 17). To give you some idea of the speed boost, I set up a motion track on a point in a six-second clip and tracked it three ways: Software-only on a 900 mHz Athlon PC, software-only on a 550 mHz G4, and G4-assisted on the same 550 mHz G4. The results?

Figure 17: G4 users just might be interested in G4-optimized motion tracking.

• Athlon 900, software only: 1 minute, 5 seconds
• G4 550, software only: 54 seconds
• G4 550, G4-assisted: 11 seconds

Rather unscientific, but impressive nonetheless.

9) It now runs natively on Mac OS X.

I don't think a whole lot more needs to be said about this, except that due to Commotion Pro's heavy reliance on RAM playback, it's nice not having to manually wrangle with OS 9's memory segmenting anymore. And, if you own version 4 already, it's a free update, albeit a hefty 30 MB download from Pinnacle Systems' site.

10) It stays crunchy, even in milk.

I invite you to test this one out for yourself. And please, be sure to let me know what you find here.

Limitations

Commotion Pro has only one real limitation of note, which has to do with cross-platform project sharing. I wouldn't have even thought about testing this out if it wasn't for a couple of mysterious AppleScripts that showed up in my Commotion Pro folder after installation (fig. 18). What did I need a Windows CPJ converter for? As it turns out, nothing. It didn't do anything (that I could tell) to CPJ files I made on the Windows version. However, I did find out in the process that some projects saved on Windows do not open correctly in the Mac version, causing me to re-import footage files in some cases. Since the keyframes and all the other custom (and irreplaceable) information seemed to come over just fine, and a simple Replace Footage command fixed the busted footage, this limitation is not a show stopper. It is, however, definitely something to be wary of if you plan to do any cross-platform projects with Commotion Pro. For the record, going from Mac to Windows worked fine for me every time.

Figure 18: Hmm...

There is another, largely conceptual, limitation of Commotion Pro, which would really only affect those of you who own neither Commotion Pro nor the After Effects Production Bundle and are trying to decide which to purchase. The fact that I can even say the last sentence is good; it means that no longer do you have to own both programs in order to have motion graphics and compositing on the same desktop. Commotion Pro's limitation here is that After Effects PB still beats it hands down in the motion graphics arena. Sure, Commotion Pro has added enough to make it a passable program for motion graphics, but where Commotion Pro continues to excel is in the compositing of live footage, and it is in this space where Commotion Pro is light years ahead of After Effects. So it really comes down to what you need. Do you primarily do heavy-duty motion graphics? Then After Effects PB is still, in my opinion, the clear choice. But do you work a lot with raw live footage, often needing to clean it up for compositing? Then Commotion Pro is the winner here. Commotion Pro and After Effects PB are still complementary products to a large degree, and the lines between the two remain sufficiently clear so that each has a standout set of strengths. But, as each is adding elements of the other, you don't necessarily have to have both any more to get a complete package.

The Bottom Line

I found Commotion Pro 4.1 for the Mac, whether running on OS 9 or my preferred choice, OS X, to be a mature, stable, and surprisingly full-featured effects package, so it gets a Strong Buy rating. In addition to offering extremely powerful painting, compositing, and rotoscoping tols, Pinnacle Systems has managed to produce a viable alternative to After Effects, albeit with different strengths and a slightly different focus.

Commotion Pro 4.1 at a Glance

Maker: Pinnacle Systems
Price: $995 for full version, $249 for version 3.x upgrade, free upgrade from version 4
Platforms: Macintosh OS 9/X, Windows 98/NT4/2000
URL: http://www.pinnaclesys.com/
Overall Impression: An outstanding, high-end, professional effects package, which is slowly but surely adding motion graphics features to emerge as a full-fledged After Effects alternative.
Key Benefits: Integrated compositing, painting, rotoscoping, and motion graphics in a single program. For the price, doesn't dissapoint in terms of features.
Disappointments: None significant.
Recommendation: Strong Buy

Filed under: Review on January 16th, 2002

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