Comparing After Effects to Moho’s Timeline Capabilities

Moho, (formerly Anime Studio) has a great way of editing keyframes that is both artist and animator friendly. It presents a simplified way to focus on what is important — the Keyframe and timeline. If you are wanting to get into Moho for character and other animation, here is a look at how keyframe editing differs between After Effects and Moho, presented by Jared Hundley.

Ae’s Timeline of All Trades and an Expert at None.

One of my greatest point of contention with After Effects is that the composition window is trying to be way too many things. Its the layer stack, the property editor, the keyframe animation timeline, the graph editor and the sequencer all at once. After Effects has morphed from it’s initial use as a compositor and visual effects tool, to a motion graphics and animation toolset that is widely used today.

After Effects wants animators to work like they are in an edit suite

Ae’s Animation Mess

The problem is that After Effects wants animators to work like they are in an edit suite. If you are an animator animating in After Effects, hundreds of layers can clutter your workflow. Even though your main focus should be with keyframes.

Moho’s Animation Friendly Workflow

Most applications other than After Effects handle animation in a cleaner and much more efficient way. You should check out Moho’s (formerly Anime Studio) timeline and how it compares to After Effects simply in terms of user experience alone.

Moho Versus After Effects

Here, Award winning animator Jared Hundley offers us a quick comparison with the workflow for keyframe editing in Moho vs After Effects. The art of creating keyframes is pretty much universal, but the act of editing keyframes differs quite a bit between the two applications.

Moho will fill in the timeline with the animator’s selection. This is how most application handle animation workflow. If you want to alter keyframes for the arm of a character… then select it, and the timeline fills in with those keyframes.

Hiding vs Showing

After Effects hides a lot of useful keyframe information from us. For one thing, After Effects provides no keyframe overview. If a layer has all its properties rolled all the way up to the clip level, then visually, there actually is no way of knowing if there is animation there at all.

Another example of this is when you are keying individual points of a path. After Effects doesn’t actually show you which points correspond with which keyframes.

Moho is Worth a Try

It seems like Moho will strike more of an affinity with animators, more so than After Effects does. Moho seems like it was developed with animation workflows as the focus. There typically is a 30 day demo of Moho, but that doesn’t seem available yet. In the meantime, have a look at what Moho has to offer After Effects users.