Motion gains advanced color grading, fun new filters, Core Text engine & more

Apple today announced an update to Motion for Mac.

Motion is Apple’s software for easy creation of powerful motion graphics with support for cinematic 2D, 3D and 360° titles, fluid transitions and realistic, hardware-accelerated effects.

Motion 5.4.2 brings a comprehensive set of color grading tools and a pair of fun new effects.

The new color tools include color wheels, color curves, hue/saturation curves and custom LUTs that match the pro color-correction features in Final Cut Pro. In fact, the same Final Cut Pro X tools can now be used in Motion to fine-tune the look of titles and motion graphics.

The new filters include a customizable comic effect—which turns any image or video into color or monochrome comic book illustration—and a fun new tiny planet filter that transforms 360-degree videos into spherical animations that can be keyframed to change over time.

Apple shared a quick video to show how the tiny planet filter lets users create interesting spherical effects with 360-degree video. It’s embedded right above so give it a quick watch.

Here’s the full changelog:

Advanced color grading

  • Use color wheels in 1-up or 4-up layouts to quickly adjust hue, saturation and brightness.
  • Apply professional color curves to make ultra-fine adjustments to color and contrast.
  • Hue/saturation curves let you select and change a specific hue or brightness level while leaving other parts of the image unchanged.
  • Use the eye dropper with the color and hue/saturation curves to quickly sample parts of an image for adjustment.
  • Apply custom LUTs from popular color grading apps and sites.
  • Adjust color corrections over time with precise keyframe controls.

Comic filter

  • Instantly turn any photo or video into a comic book illustration.
  • Choose from a variety of styles to create color, monochrome or grayscale artwork.
  • Refine the comic book look with simple controls to adjust ink edges, fill and smoothness.

Tiny Planet filter

  • Add the Tiny Planet filter when adding 360º video to a non-360° project to create interesting spherical looks.
  • Use the Z and X Rotation parameters to wrap your tiny planet effect into an infinite cylinder.
  • Adjust the Y Rotation parameter to move your subject horizontally within the tiny planet.
  • Animate the field of view to transition from a close up to a satellite view flying high above your footage.
  • Give generators and titles a powerfully warped look by applying the Tiny Planet filter.

Core Text engine

  • Core Text engine ensures accurate display of Arabic letters, Indic vowel signs in Devanagari and Thai diacritics.
  • Correct rendering and animation of emoji, thin glyphs, capital letters in various point sizes and vertical text are joined and tracked correctly.

The previous update brought native support for ProRes RAW files, including ProRes RAW HQ files created by ATOMOS recorders and DJI Inspire 2 drone, along with under-the-hood tweaks resulting in smooth playback and real-time graphics creation on laptop and desktop Macs.

Final Cut Pro X and Compressor were updated today, too.

Final Cut Pro X received support for third-party workflow extensions from Frame.io, Shutterstock and CatDV support to the professional video app, plus other new features and enhancements.

Compressor gained a new 64-bit engine that takes full advantage of all the memory in your computer to increase performance when encoding high resolution footage. The app continues to support 32-bit codecs for those times when you need to work with key legacy formats.

The Motion 5.4.2 update is available at no additional charge to existing users of the software. New customers can get Motion for $50 from Mac App Store.

Education customers can purchase Apple’s Pro Apps Bundle for Education for $199.99, which includes Final Cut Pro X, Motion, Compressor, Logic Pro X and MainStage.