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Mighty Motion Tracker
The motion tracker with Commotion is pretty impressive, in both speed and ability. Like the motion tracker you'll find in After Effects or other programs, the motion tracker in Commotion enables you to apply effects to either static or moving images.

You can see the different values it will take into consideration before and during a "track," from tracking on luminance values to tracking in reverse, to tracking down to 1/256th of a pixel. You can set up multiple trackers too, but remember, the more you add the more it will bog down. OK, now repeat after me, more RAM is good.

Once you've performed a track you can either apply the information to a point on a roto-spline (or the entire spline) or export the tracking data to a second program such as Electric Image or After Effects. Lastly, you can apply the info to the stabilize menu or the math menu where further tweaking of the track takes place depending upon the type of shot (average, scaling, velocity, smoothness of trackers' keyframes). These are examples of the little things that give Commotion that nice touch.

Onion-skinning (a virtual light table where you can see the previous frame where you were painting in order to do a "follow-the-leader" while painting). The ability to paint on fields as opposed to frames on-the-fly as you go is a nice touch. And with the ability to import plugins from After Effects, this will increase the uses of Commotion and may very well be able to perform tasks otherwise given to After Effects.

Troubles in Paradise
Not every piece of software is always going to be bulletproof from problems and concerns to the end user. For instance, projects can't be saved. So if you've just spent hours painting an animation, and the power is knocked out; you're out of luck. You'll have to paint everything all over again. The solution (or shall I say the preventative) would be to render your sequences every so often in case such a problem should arise. That way you have some of the shot completed instead of starting over. (Note: motion trackers CAN be saved once you've tracked something, they just save as an .mtd file.)

Another pet peeve is how Commotion can't seem to paint in an alpha channel on an RGB image while using the Onion Skin technique at the same time. If there is a sequence of Targa frames into which you want to paint an alpha sequence (so you can import it into After Effects to use and tweak later), you would need another workaround. Normally I like to use onion skinning so I can follow my strokes throughout the sequence to create a flowing animation, but alas, it is not to be at the moment. So instead, I go ahead and use some offbeat exotic color on the frames (so I can use onion skinning to see from frame to frame what the heck I'm doing) that I can later key in After Effects to get a separate alpha channel sequence of just my painted animation to then tweak in AE.

To get around a few problems, such as your machine having scarce RAM and not being able to load everything, keep in mind that lowering the resolution, color space, and cropping the image will increase the number of frames that you can import into Commotion. Hopefully these few problems will be solved when the next version comes around. Here's the benefit of Puffin's constant development efforts on this heavily-used software package -- if there's a feature that's missing, wait a while and it'll probably be added.

The Bottom Line:
Overall, Commotion can stand alone as a brilliant rotoscoping and motion tracking tool that can provide some very high-end looking results. The program also compliments other compatible software packages in just the same degree of excellence as its ability to interact with programs like After Effects. Commotion 2.1 for Windows is definitely not to be missed and should be located on the shelf of every serious compositor. For registered users, an update to version 2.1.2 can be downloaded directly from the Puffin site.

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