Motion Sickness?!

Hey Guys,

Newbie here - long time member of the WhatMobile forums where I've spent the last god-knows-how-long telling people how great Macs are.. thought it was time to graduate..

Anyway, I wanted to ask you guys for some advice if that's ok?
I'm in the middle of making a DVD for my parents' 25th Wedding Anniversary this year which I've been constructing on iMovie.. it's all stills with Ken Burns effect, old home video, soundbites from family and friends etc..

I've come to the stage where I want to design some kind of graphic for the end of it.. just to say Happy Anniversary and to round it off.. you know. So I'm looking at which software to use.. I'm new to graphic design but a very quick learner (I taught myself iMovie from scratch in four days)..

At work (I'm a TV Producer for Sky News in the UK), we use Adobe After Effects for all of our graphics and everyone says how fantastic it is.. But I must admit, I'm struggling with it - I think it's one of those progs you'd struggle to teach yourself but could easily pick up if you were properly trained and used it every day..
So, I'm looking at Apple Motion 2 which looks good and I believe is fantastic. Also, I figure it would be easier to teach myself in the same way that iMovie was compared to AE.

Is anyone here a user of Motion and is it any good? Also, is there anywhere I can download a trial version as £199 is a lot to spend on something i may not be able to get the hang of..
I've tried looking around for a tryout version - and even on Limewire PURELY for evaluation purposes and to see if I can get the hang of it.. but no luck neye:

What do you reckon? Is it any good? And where can I get a tryout version?

Thanks in advance,

Phil

did a quick Apple search check here
http://search.info.apple.com/?search=Go&lr=lang_en&kword=&q=Motion

Hi

Thanks for this - took a look but this is Apple just talking about Motion rather than individual people's experiences or a way of downloading a trial

Tried finding a free trail but no luck, maybe someone else will know where to look good luck!

Then again I looked deeper will this help?
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/motiontrial.html

I have been using AE for years and just tried Apple Motion for a major project this week... It is a great program for animation and basic motion graphics. Much more interactive and fun to work with than After Effects. And for the price it can't be beat. But be aware of this... It by NO means gives you the real time performance it claims to have... You need a beast of a machine to run this program without pulling every last one of your hairs out. That being said I was doing pretty intense graphics so for what you are talking about it might not be too bad. A gig of RAM is a bare minimum... regardless of what Apple says the requirements are.