If you’d gone up to a digital video pro last year and said, “In 12 months you’ll be using your Mac to paint on any frame of a hill-screen, video resolution movie, with a full range of sophisticated paint and spline-based tools, and then be able to play it back immediately at 30 frames per second without any compression,” odds are you would have been laughed out of the studio.
But Puffin Design’s Commotion makes it possible. Commotion is a new breed of Mac video effects and animation software, providing a lot of what dedicated systems like Quantel’s Harry can do — for about 1/50th the price. Among the possibilities: remove wire rigs and other unwanted objects, composite multiple images together with Bezier spline-based traveling mattes, and paint at hghtning speed. This program alone makes the Mac an entirely viable platform for Hollywood film and video special effects postproduction.
Let’s start with Commotion’s blistering speed. It’s one of the most responsive paint programs we’ve ever used, despite the fact that it deals with hundreds of frames, instead of only one. Commotion accomplishes this by loading as many fmaes as possible into a “live frames” buffer, where they can be edited or played quickly. And yes, it really can play an uncompressed 640-X-480 video clip at 30 fps — on the right hardware, that is. We tested Commotion with several video boards on a 200MHz 604e with a 512 cache and 160MB of RAM (when you’re using Commotion, you want as much RAM as you can get). A video-resolution clip couldn’t quite make 30 fps on a Xclaim VR board from ATI or an Imagine 128 board from Number 9, but the trusty old Xclaim 3D board did the job. Commotion also provides handy workarounds for the RAM impoverished, such as the ability to load only part of a given frame instead of the entire thing.
Commotion’s painting tools are the equal of almost any other paint program. Onion-skinning — the ability to show previous or following fimes as translucent layers over the current frame — is especially well implemented. You’ll get more previsualization help in the Time Adjust and Animation Timing functions, which give you manual control over the timing of a clip.
The wire removal tool deletes thin lines (such as those created by wire rigs, mic booms, telephone poles, aerials, and the like) by blending the pixels around them, or by referring to pixels in other frames or other files. To remove larger objects, use Commotion’s powerful Super Clone Tool. You not only can clone from another area in the same frame, but you can clone from any frame in any open document, and easily switch between multiple clone sources. The area you are cloning from can be easily adjusted, since Commotion superimposes the clone source over the image you intend to clone to.
Commotion extends Photoshop’s pen tool into the fourth dimension with the Rotospline tool. Rotosplining is primarily intended to generate alpha channel masks that exactly follow an object. Other programs can do this, but Commotion’s implementation excels in strong keyframe and velocity controls. And since Rotosplines also can control any of Commotion’s paint operations, the possibilities are almost limitless.
No first release is perfect, of course. Commotion’s Save command saves only the area loaded into memory. Since higher-resolution movies must be loaded in pieces, you can easily lose half your work and not know it. Using Save As instead of Save and throwing out the extra copy prevents this. And Rotosplines aren’t as responsive as some other Bezier spline implementations. As of this writing, Commotion could not move the contents of selections or paste them from the clipboard, but Puffin plans to release an update to fix this.
Despite these minor flaws. Commotion is refreshingly competent. Its special-effects-oriented tools and speed don’t just rival those of expensive high-end systems — in some ways, they surpass them. Put Commotion together with Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, a good 3D program, a few plug-ins, and some decent hardware, and you’re playing with unprecedented effects power.
Anzovin, Raf. (February 1998). Commotion 1.0. MacAddict. (pg. 54).
Scott Squires
Applications
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12 / 
2015-08-13 / 
416a1372a371cb68bca356cda9aa135e9b798026 / 
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Commotion105.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
