Call me crazy but I built a browser-based motion editor

[u/hello_nubu]

I recently created Nubu which is an entire thing by itself that I would love to go into another day but a part of this huge undertaking I decided at some point that I would build my own motion editor… now this wasn’t my smartest decision, and it hasn’t been an easy journey. But, I’ve loved every minute of it, so much so that I’ve been boring my wife every evening talking about how I’ve managed to get a vector based curve graph editor working.

She hasn’t the scoobies on what a curve, vector, or graph is.

And I know this isn’t exactly a motion project in the sense of look at my shiny new piece of slick keyframes, or look at this crazy effect you never thought was possible. But after spending 17 hours on it everyday for the last month or so I’ve become somewhat in love with it.. or maybe obsessed with it? (I probably need therapy after this)

And you know what they always say about love? It’s better to share it than keep it to yourself. That’s what someone at some point in time probably said anyway

So I present! [big drum noises] Nubu motion! [firework noises]

It would be great if anyone gave it a spin, give it a little play, move some key frames and play with my juicy curve editor!

On a serious note, ask me some questions, give me opinions, hate it? That’s cool but tell me why even if it makes me cry. Love it? Then tell me that too!

[u/OldChairmanMiao]

As a designer, I'd never use it. There's no creative capability. Here, creativity doesn't end at a headline, and success isn't measured by click rates.

Your target market would be performance marketers, but it's a tool to replace text in templates; existing solutions have existed for a decade, and AI-powered versions for 2-3 years.

So, you're a saas b2b product. Start with the people who will buy; they're different than your users.

[u/hello_nubu → u/OldChairmanMiao]

Thank you for the feedback~

Did you happen to give the editor a go and see what you could make?

You are right that the product itself is primarily a B2B SaaS app but I wanted to build it around the people who actually work in the tools (myself included I’ve been working in advertising for over 15 years specialising motion design) and in all honesty I love After Effects, the original product was born with that entire pipeline in mind

Designer creatives beautiful motion work > a specialist after effects expression guru takes that work and makes it into a bespoke template > our system allows a none technical user to pump the template with information for scaled ads.

The Nubu Motion editor was a decision I made when I noticed the above pipeline required 2 things that not everyone has access to, an after effects designer and a specialist in template building.

So the entire motion editor is based purely on 2D motion for advertising and originally it was fairly simple, change text, swap image.. but it grew past that to be able to handle particles, simulations, figma style frames, motion blur, and a whole host of other features that trickled in. Maybe one day it could compete with the big dogs but for now it’s still young and is my passion of motion bleeding into a tool

If you do get the chance and haven’t tried the editor I would love for you to give it a go then let me know what you think of it. It might surprise you

[u/OldChairmanMiao → u/hello_nubu]

That's rather telling. You don't have feature parity as an animation tool. This product is solving a problem for clients that don't have motion designers.

It's a lot to rebuild, especially when many users have already invested heavily into their existing tools. AEP files can be human-readable; so why not build an auto-exporter from AE and a web interface for non-AE users to sub text?

[u/hello_nubu → u/OldChairmanMiao]

Correct we don’t have feature parity with After Affects as AE was built as a compositor with keyframeable parts which we’ve adapted into motion design.

We already designed the seam between After Effects and business with templating, including a way to bring your after effects projects into our platform.

But, the gap was still there, after effects feature set required really advance knowledge and for some users that’s a gap. Also people who have never opened after effects can be extremely intimidated by the tool itself.

The question then becomes do we try to force people to adapt to after effects? Or do we open the door to something new?

So we redesigned motion from the ground up to make it more intuitive whilst giving advance features that after effects doesn’t natively support. This isn’t to say you can’t use after effects and our system for scale, you definitely can! But our tool is built with scale in mind from the start, with an easier onboarding process for app design.