The new Photomotion (2nd gen) is here 🎉

When we first released Photomotion X in 2019, we focused heavily on bringing the most versatile projections to you, as well as features to match this. We sat down and started thinking what's the next step for Photomotion. Adding more features to already feature-rich tool feels like a step back, and quite frankly, majority of our users never get to use these niche tools. We knew Photomotion X was the best tool available on the market, but we can do better. So today we're introducing the second generation of Photomotion. This is by far the fastest Photomotion to date, with higher quality (all projections are now native 4K), easier to use and more robust in the real life scenarios. We hope you'll love it and get to use it more than X!

Photomotion plan going forward

Photomotion X - focus on bringing in the most versatile projections and features.
Photomotion 2nd gen (released today) - heavy focus on usability, speed, real-world usecases and user feedback. Expect frequent updates based on your feedback.
Photomotion Plugin - focusing on bringing our viewport based Photomotion into it's own plugin for After Effects and other tools.

New Projections

We're adding Depth projection - great for animating animals, food, products, cars etc. - everything you wished Portrait did, Depth does. It also comes with depth map builder that is super helpful for creating depth maps of rooms, adding objects to your scene etc.

Native Facebook 3D

If you don't know what Facebook 3D is - it's basically a realtime 3D post that can react to your mouse cursor or phone accelerometer. It took us some time to come up with something that actually looks good every time. Some projections (Portrait, Parallax, Depth) now include native Facebook 3D builder + exporter. It is really easy to use and most importantly easy to tweak once you spot any imperfections once uploaded on Facebook.

New Features

4K UltraHD everywhere - we've made some significant improvements to how 4K works in Photomotion and I'm happy to say it's now been implemented to all projections, including custom aspect ratios (e.g. you can render to 4K even when you do Square, Portrait or Vertical aspect ratios)

Autoloop - Photomotion now automatically calculates auto loops (boomerangs) and uses cache from your already pre-rendered frames. So now you can export animations as long as you wish.

Motion Blur - Portrait now includes in-camera motion blur in case you have time to spare and want to add this additional layer of photo realism to it

Usability & Speed

Speed Workflow - We've made a significant cut in both preview and render times by introducing Speed Workflow (starting with Portrait). This feature will automatically recalculate all nested expressions and tweaks the engine to use lower resolution for previews, while keeping the final render untouched. It is approx. 3x faster than previews in native 4K/HD. Combine this with After Effects' native viewport scaling and you get some seriously quick previews. This feature alone is able to save you around half of your production time.

Expressions Engine - We've also rewritten all expressions, making them easier for After Effects to process since we're now using minified expressions instead of encrypted jsxbin. This also speeds up not just previews, but also render times. We are seeing approx. 30% decrease in both compared to our previous version.

Copying projects - Copying projects to other locations is now 80% faster - you read that right - we've simplified the internal structure to a point where copying the project file with assets to a new location is way faster than before.
Reduced file size - Photomotion is now 1.3GB lighter (Portrait). That's a lot of data you don't need to copy/store anymore.

New Tutorials

Introducing Photomotion Classes (videos) - We are introducing Photomotion Classes - a new concept of video tutorials where you can follow along with us as we convert various types of pictures. We're planning on releasing these continuously so feel free to send us your pictures you want to see!

Introducing Photomotion Tips (videos) - These short tips are aimed at various aspect of each projection - they are short (usually around 1-2min each) so it's really easy to pick up one of these as you need.

Single written reference documentation - This is your single point of reference for each projection. You no longer need to search for answer in many divided documentations - all you need is in this one document. Combine this with above mentioned Photomotion Classes and Tips and you will master Photomotion in no time.