Motion designers on the PC may have been envious of Motion on the Mac from time to time. Although the latter is not as powerful as After Effects, it allows the complete rendering to be done on the GPU. This gives Motion a very fast preview, often in real time for procedural effects.
However, Motion cannot fully exploit this strength, as its interface is a bit too "playful" for procedural projects. If you want to create really deep, nested parameter combinations, you won't get anywhere with After Effects. Because here, you'll quickly be slain by thousands of layers, and the compositing program then acts only sluggishly.
Cavalry now wants to recommend himself for such cases. In fact, the program offers a fresh approach to motion design: You create your projects from simple elements (primitives) that can be assembled and animated by procedural changes and behaviours. The whole thing can be compared in its depth to shader development, but the interface makes everything manageable even for non-programmers.
Some mathematical understanding will help in any case, but you can also discover or elicit amazing effects by simply experimenting with the controls. Since everything is rendered on the CPU, you can enjoy a real-time preview in most cases. The following video provides a first insight into the way it works:
Currently Cavalry is still Public Beta, which anyone can join. However, it is not yet clear how much the final version will cost. But if you earn your money with motion design, you will surely take a closer look just out of curiosity, no matter what price tag will be on the app later...
Thanks to Markus G for the hint in our forum...
;)