You may know Commotion’s professional painting and rotoscoping effects from Hollywood films such as Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and Driven. Version 4 brings speed improvements to paint, compositing, and rotoscoping operations, as well as some workflow optimizations and enhanced control over parameters. What's lacking is a cool $1,000 from the (previously $1,995) price tag. On the downside, version 4.0 has a much smaller manual than previous editions offered.
Commotion’s core functionality hasn’t changed much. The painting feature, for example, is still an essential part of Commotion, useful for painting traditional, cel animation-style brush strokes and for utilitarian tasks such as wire removal. The paint engine’s retooled algorithms provide a 200 percent speed boost. Rotoscoping and compositing functions also run more quickly, speeding up Commotion’s already fast work environment.
Two welcome additions to Commotion’s toolkit are grouping control and the Timeline Browser. With grouping, you can combine several layers into a single group (similar to layer grouping in Photoshop 6) and apply effects (such as tint) or properties (such as scale) en masse. The Timeline Browser is a new minibrowser that resides next to the Timeline, displaying the groups and their nested layers in an easy-to-read list. Double-clicking a folder (group) in the Timeline Browser will show only that group’s layers in the timeline, giving you a cleaner working environment. In comps that have a multitude of layers, this enhancement makes for a much more manageable workflow.
Commotion Pro’s new trick is time remapping: This effect alters the sense of time in a single pass. Using the Curve Editor, you can accelerate or decelerate the scene and even make the action move backward in time. Creating this effect with Commotion is as easy as dragging points on a curve.
With all the improvements to an excellent program, not to mention the fact that it no longer requires a hardware key to run, it’s sad to see that the documentation has taken a step back (the printed manual has no index, but the PDF version is searchable). The tutorial section is also smaller, but Pinnacle Systems says it will soon post more tutorials online.
What can you say about an already excellent program when it improves — and drops $1,000 in price? Even with a less substantial manual and no OS X version (Pinnacle’s working on one). Commotion Pro’s unmatched abilities make it a Freakin' Awesome tool.
Tokuda, Andrew. (January 2001). Commotion Pro 4.0. MacAddict. (pg. 44).
Pinnacle Systems
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
63 / 
2015-08-10 / 
c3773b8f64350d7c0ad91359124bf1948a3f8d9e / 
/ 
Commotiontm_Pro_4.1c_folder.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
