There are a number of reasons why producers are sitting on the fence with Moho. Some factors have been listed above. There are more.
Much of the indecision is not about the product but about the LM infrastructure - the lengthly absense did great damage to Moho, and unfortunately, there is no getting around that. The announcement that a large commercial partner was welcomed. But the lack of information since then is again causing concern. A favourable announcement could attract commercial clients and steady the nerves of existing ones - an update statement is overdue.
I made the point six months ago that future development of Moho should focus one the needs of the comercail studios. For the home/independant user, many new tools (such as network rendering and user define paths) might seem irrelevant but other features (reuseable librarys) most certainly would be appealing. Some of the posts mentioned in the thread above reflect this - layer control and matting are both studio critical. It would be advantagous to have a forum catagory for commercial developemnt, a place where studios can input industry-critical information into the development process: Studios are not interested in point rotation tools and wallpaper script; Batch renderering tools/network usage and global libraries most certainly are.
My personally thought is there should only be one version of Moho - I have been instudios where there are varying levels of program - lite, studio and complete (which in the case of Maya means incomplete as the Unlimited vesrion is complete). It causes confusion with producers and they hate it with a vengence.
As for the concept the "a high price makes it reassuring"to commercial clients is bunkum - Serif proved that with such products as Page Plus ... they kept the price low, offered good consolidation deals and marketed it agressively. They have done exceptionally well with that policy. Conversely, snimation software companies such as Cambridge which had a good product and a very high prices/limiting license policies, were shafted by the introduction of Flash. Very few series animation companies can afford to retain Animo in the current TV market.
When considering the commercial Moho uptake (or lack of it), LM should remember that producers are like sheep - they see what everyone else is using then do the same. If they find people walking away from something, they follow blindly. And producers talk to eash other, a lot. They meet up at industry jollies such as Annecy ... these meeting places can work in LM's favour as it is a central showcase for films made by exy software. Get a special or an award winning series made with Moho screened at Annecy and the sales will go through the roof. Lost Marbles could help in this respect - there have been various competition run on the site. If Lost Marbles sponsored a competition where the best film (voted by us) was sponsored through Annecy, Cartoon in the Bay or any other top animation festival, the producers would take note.
There are problems with Moho which affect sales. There are advantages which the marketing has not capitalised upon:
- Bugs must be fixed. Later is not an option: If its broke, then time has to be spent repairing it before moving on. New features may be welcomed but problems that have not been resolved two years after being reported is simply a commercial turn-off.
- Bugs must reported when fixed. The latest update came with the message saying "a number of bugs had been fixed". Sorry but this really is not good enough: The users need to know which ones ... only then do we know which ones to test: The problem may be fixed, it may not. Worse it might work on a MAC but not a PC. Without that information, how do I know if its been lookad at - If I test a new version and find something is still the same, how do I or LM know if the bug is closed? - LM may tick it off as fixed when it's still broke.
- Currently, the Number 1 bug for fixing is the bitmap/vector rendering difference: When rendering, Moho pixel averages bitmaps, vectored layers don't - the result means that on track-out where the bitmap must scale, a vectored character shimmies (jitter registers) on the bitmap background. I recently had to output a straight track into a high-res sattelite image - Moho simple could not render a broadcast acceptable render AT ALL ... the SD image jittered around all over the place as if shot on an unregistered pin camera - put mildly, the producer was not pleased as we had extremely limited time scale in which to delivery the project (hours) - I completed all the digital rostrum moves with Combustion. Failures like that do permanent damage to a product. I'm still shocked by that render - if you cannot accomplish a stock camera move from 6 field 2N 2W to 12 Field centre. .................. If no other bug is fixed this year, that is the one which must be done.
- Layer control and mastting are very big issues for commercial studios - at the present time, both are lacking (in layer masking exists but layer masking doesn't). I found some set-ups with two characters dancing around a maypole. If you are using software with layer ordering and layer-to-layer matting, the composite is fast and easy. With Moho, you cannot do those scenes without a huge amount of layer duplication and turning stuff on and off. This is an area for development of a commercially orientated Moho version.
- Moho cannot import and export layers/grouped layer. Flash can. Commercial studios must reuse animation, its a commercial fact of life. If you can't, then a producer will call NEXT - he does not have the luxury of production budget to create new every scene. That means re-using material. You must be able to save out material to stock libraries.
- The ease-in ease-out cushions are still not fixed despited being reported 2 years ago. It seriously affects the look of the animation. Human action is not linear nor smooth, its ease into or ease out ... you want to have wieght and comic timing in your work, then you must have the correct cushions.
- Moho can render HD ready - its not marketed as such. Minor changes like having the 1920*1080 HD camera side in the default presets, can greatly affect sales - HD is the big buzz i nthe broadcast industry at present - LM have a HD (near) ready product and could be marketing as such (assuming hte above bug is fixed). But any operator who opens the camera preset currently won't find the HD format setting - Why isn't it there - itis a one line code change.
My personal hunch is the commercial guys will continue to sit on the fence until the next release. Our studio were very seriously worried by Mike's long absence - I know others were too.
But using the new co-partnership and key selling points such as HD, the product could make serious in roads into Flash sales; Flash works but its not ideal.
Moho is simply better, and if the above issues are addressed, its a potential market leader.
Rhoel
Both LM and Moho deserve a higher profile in the industry.
