Which Apple technologies to use for simple 2d motion graphics software?

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Created Nov ’24

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I plan to create a simple motion graphics software for macOS that animates text, basic shapes, and handles audio. I'll use SwiftUI for the UI.

What are the commonly used technologies for rendering animated graphics? Core Animation is suitable for UI animations but not for exporting and controlling UI animations.

Basic requirements:

Timeline user interface
Animation of text and basic shapes
Viewer in SwiftUI GUI with transport control (play, pause, scrub, …)
Export to video file

Is Metal or Core Graphics typically used directly? I want to keep it as simple as possible.

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Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

2w

Hello and thank you for the interesting questions.

For the sake of discussion let's say you aim to build an app like Reality Composer Pro.

Given SwiftUI, take a look at SwiftUI Animations and View's Graphics and rendering modifiers for creating your UI.

You can also take advantage of RealityKit's Views and attachments. RealityView does a lot of heavy lifting.

For animation import and export we recommend (like RCP) using USD, and AVFoundation if you're rendering video from animation frames.

Metal, Core Graphics and Core Animation are low-level frameworks that you're unlikely to need in most circumstances, and add considerable complexity.

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