Loved MotionVFX. Spent over $2k on their great plugins. I say “loved” because they recently moved to subscription only service and no longer sell plugins individually. And I’m guessing this news of Apple acquiring the company was the reason why they gave existing users the date of last Thursday to download everything they bought before it would be removed.
So this is why they treated their loyal long term customers so badly this year and killed the store and our ability to purchase and got rid of all the motion templates I loved and wanted to purchase etc. Retired all the good stuff including over 1000 templates and on and on I could go. A lot of people and businesses are upset at them. People recently spent a lot of money there recently, only to have them discontinue them all.
Now we know why. They were no longer in business for themselves, they were being sold to Apple. Apple should let MotionVFX release, for free, all those templates etc. that MotionVFX trashed, that I guess Apple doesn't want. That would be the right thing to do for all of us that want them.
Edit: They have also privatized their Reddit r/motionVFX that customers were commenting in.
If you are a recent user and only subscribed, you don't know about it. Long term users know.
I was referencing my earlier post in this thread where they dumped all us perpetual license holders and buyers for FCP only. Without warning. They shut down the store, except for DVR and Adobe, without warning and then proceeded to delete a lot of their products including over 1000 Motion Project templates, some of which I wanted to purchase and had plans for future projects etc.
I found out by accident by refreshing their site and then received an email. I had just a few weeks before I wouldn't even be able to download my previous purchases before they were deleted. They are now gone for good and the subscription doesn't have any of them either. Completely gone, except for those who purchased a copy before this all went down and saved it.
It was the most anti-consumer behaviour I have experienced in a long time and it stung hard.
(Wall of text alert)
Jumping on this train too… these people went from “I love them can’t get enough of all the plugins” to feeling downright scammed.
Started using FCP properly since 2019, and while trying to find parallels to some plugins I was used to in After Effects (like video copilot’s Element3D) naturally landed on the motionVFX webpage and their mO2 plugins.
In practice it never really worked properly, the “title” vs “generator” jankiness of FCP as the entry point to load a scene made it even harder, dealing with dropzones is so bad in general UX, it was full of tiny bugs, a generator could suddenly stop working on a project it would need to be reinserted again and started from scratch, etc… but the templates were so amazing from the get go and so professional that I decided to support them with my wallet.
All their plugins, templates and motion projects were of insane quality… their mFreezeFrames blew me away at the time for example. They did do a lot of custom plugin handling above and beyond what Motion could do out of the box, these guys went all in with the FxPlug SDK.
Sadly the nature of the UX of FCP’s inspector is incredibly limited when a somewhat remotely complex series of paremeters are needed… the scrollview becomes crowded, clicking on things can bug out sometimes, you can get beachballed intermittently somewhat often.
But it still worked, they made either workarounds (like for the 3D Tracker copy pasting of tracks) or we as users just dealt with what was offered without trying to customize out of the way too much.
I poured money on this, thousands of dollars, probably $5K plus, don’t even want to backtrack to check. Had almost all the mO2 suite, tons of the plugins and templates, the puppet thingy, the freeze frame ones, the clean or dynamic or “quake” intro/outros, the cinematic titles, the movie titles, mFlares, mFilmLook, LUT packs, typography packs, lower 3rds, glitch plugins, cyberpunk plugins, the tracker 3D plugins and packs. All sorts of effects and transitions too; their zoom transitions are chef’s kiss and so were the timelines starting points…
Then suddenly an eerie mood starts settling in… their promise to make mO2 be upgraded to apple silicon and FxPlug 4 starts to fade away (it only runs on old versions of FCP through Rosetta 2), they start focusing on this design studio subscription thing, and pushing for it annoyingly. Many of the plugins can’t be bought anymore or the updates (promised to be forever before) have been left frozen in time, the enhanced versions only available through the subscription services. Finding a way to buy a plugin is cumbersome now as everyone defaults to the subscription thing or they are just disappearing or they won’t be updated.
Heck at the beginning of this year I bought a few plugins but a duplicate squeezed by mistake (my mistake)… I ask for the possibility of a refund, they nicely agree, but insist on getting “mCredits”. mCredits never expire, can be used on anything, even can stack with sales discounts and all the said.
5 days later, I receive an email that I have to use mCredits because the things are expiring… really…
Then 4 weeks later that I have to download my plugins because many of them are being binned (this means they could stop working at anytime with the next FCP upgrade that brings breaking changes). They also mentioned to download the installer for them which I ever found, just went through mInstaller and hoping for the best.
And now today this, which I think it could be amazing news in general, but this last year has been problematic with this company… it’s as if something suddenly happened, suffered a sudden personality shift and started doing strange and aggressive anti consumer takes.
What’s going to happen with all this investment? Probably it will go to waste during the next couple of years… and probably I’ll be paying for some of them AGAIN in the form of a subscription tier of some sort.
And fine, I can bite the bullet, that investment has paid itself back many many times fold… I just hope that it gets back on track under Apple and, as a long shot, that somehow they manage to recognize the previous customers and their available library of products.
I’ll be keeping a serious close eye on this.
