5 stars (For the price...an absolute must) - I have to admit I was snobbish when Motion first came out. As a intermediate After Effects user, I thought, for instance, that using pre-assigned "behaviors" would look canned and amaturish (sort of like the seeing effects you know were done in imovie). But with each new project, I find myself relying more and more on Motion. For one thing, it's fast. Some people gripe that the real-time architecture is not perfect, but I can tell you that with a G4 powerbook (1.5 GHz and 1gig RAM) the difference between in speed using Motion over AE is phenominal. One of the major benefits is that you can audtion filters and behaviors on your content with virtually no wait time. Moreover, if you are using sound or music, that needs to be synched to your graphics, the playback is dramatically faster than in AE. I have chosen to use motion for simpler graphic projects (text, titling, colorizing) simply because of the vast amount of time I save not having to render everytime I tweak (and I tweak a lot). Of course, Motion as Apple readily admits, is not a substitue for After Effects when it comes to high end animation. There are no light or camera tools, and using no abilty to script (as AE does with "Expressions"). But I predict Apple will get more ambitious with each generation. Motion 2 for instance, offers the "replicator" tool, which I plan to use as a fast alternative to basic scripting.
The bottom line is that for $300 this is a amazing piece of software. It is also a great way to get started with motion graphics and actually get pretty far. It is far more easy and ituitive that AE, but, ultimately, if you are an aspiring motion graphic designer, you must master After Effects as it is still the industry standard.
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