Apple Motion Survival Guide

[Music] motion is a motion graphics app with a twist it allows you to design animation and title effects in real time in other words you can tweak your animations and instantly see the results without needing to render motion is also a whole lot easier to learn than After Effects and its total purchase price is about the same as your monthly subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud add to that some very cool particle effects and well what's not to love let's get right to it and show you just how easy it is to start creating with motion first up the project browser you see upon launch motion is tightly integrated with Final Cut Pro 10 so if you want to use it to create custom effects titles and transitions you can choose one of those templates here now if you don't edit in Final Cut don't be too concerned we're going to start with a generic motion project that'll work for any NLE that you want to throw it at let's choose 1080 sighs and set the framerate to twenty three point nine eight click open to get started right out of the gate let's import a clip to help get a sense of how motion works here we'll click the import button and grab a butterfly animation clip from the harddrive that already includes an alpha Channel press the spacebar and the butterfly animation springs to life typically you only want to work with a small portion of the timeline at any given moment we'll drag the play range out point to a little earlier in our timeline you can also set the play range in and out points using the keyboard shortcuts option command I for in and option command over out the playhead now loops around when it reaches that out point okay let's survey the interface the preview of your composition is called the canvas which makes sense since that's where you're painting your masterpiece to make sure you're viewing the entire canvas choose fit in the zoom menu at the top of the canvas below the canvas is the timeline where you see a representation of everything going on in your comp right now of course we only have one item the butterfly but directly below the canvas is another timeline called the mini timeline think of it as a solo timeline for the item you're currently working with we'll get to the rest of the interface in a moment but right now we'll animate our butterfly on this stage let's say we want the butterfly to float across the screen from left to right now we could keyframe it like any other video app and we'll look at key framing later but motion has a special animation system called behaviors make sure your clip is selected it'll have a bounding box highlighted around it and click the behaviors button then choose move from the basic motions menu a semi-transparent pane called the HUD populates with controls for the mood behavior if you don't see it just press f7 to reveal it we can drag the widget in the canvas to choose a destination point for about a flight now what if we want the butterfly to reach the destination at a specific time well this brings us to an interesting concept in motion and the significance of the mini timeline every element in motion be it a behavior or even an image filter has its own timeline you'll notice that the mini timeline has the label move on it if we press o to trim the out point of the mini time bar the butterfly stops moving and arrives at the set destination point when the playhead reaches the end of that bar this is a great way to adjust the timing of behaviors and effects without resorting to key framing you can slide the time bar to offset its start and end in the HUD we'll set the speed to ease both and now the butterfly eases into and out of the motion creating a more satisfying start and stop to see the animation without the control overlays click somewhere in the gray space of the timeline to deselect the move layer let's add a filter click on the butterflies layer in the timeline to reselect it choose filters glow dazzle will adjust the threshold control so that only the very brightest parts of the butterfly trigger a flare and will dial back the amount a little bit if you look to the left you'll see a pane called the inspector that replicates the dials and sliders in the HUD in fact you'll find there are a couple of extra controls available in the inspector that aren't in the HUD typically the HUD provides the most important parameters to adjust without getting too cluttered the inspector provides a comprehensive list of all available controls note the four tabs just above the controls this allows you to switch between general properties for the selected object controls for any behaviors attached to the object controls for the objects filters and the ability to create a drop zone if you're creating a template for Final Cut Pro 10 okay let's add another butterfly to duplicate an existing object just option drag the object in the canvas let's do something a little more interesting with this new butterfly well select the move behavior on our new copy and press the Delete key to remove it and we'll drag its mini timeline bot to shift it in time a little so that its wings aren't flapping in an identical motion to the other butterfly and now we'll actually add another behavior to our original butterfly first we select it and then choose behaviors simulations vortex the vortex behavior causes other objects to swirl around whatever object has the vortex applied to it let's add a little drag to pull the other butterfly in and now we see our copied butterfly is spiraling in toward the original we can add a little more strength to the attraction just to make it a little more interesting and there you have it a fairly complex animation with nary a keyframe in sight let's round out our tour of the interface the layers tab lists all the elements in your composition then give it as a summary view for your timeline the higher items stack on top of the lower ones then we have the media tab which lists any items imported into motion in our case that's only the butterfly quicktime movie with the media tab open in the layers pane the inspector shows a corresponding media tab here you can change the interpreted framerate pixel aspect ratio and alpha type among other things next to the media tab is the audio tab we of course have no audio so it's empty finally at far left is the library this is a large list of presets and royalty-free content available for inclusion in your projects select an item and any animation associated with it will preview in the viewer at top left the presets are often useful right out of the box but they also serve as a great starting point for your own particle and mograph effects and before we move on let's quickly talk about the function keys the function keys f1 through f5 the inspector while f5 through f9 toggle the various other panes of the interface between hidden and visible it's worth building a little muscle memory with these function key presets they'll help to optimize your screen real estate especially if you're working off a MacBook at the heart of many motion graphics comps is titling and text effects here motion does not disappoint let's create a new project to experiment with titling select the text tool at the base of the canvas click in the canvas and start typing something not happy with the font go to the HUD if it's missing press f7 to show it and click in the font list menu as you hover over these fun options motion automatically updates the text in the canvas so you can see how the font works with your title nice you can change the standard properties for text here or you can visit the inspector and really go to town customizing but titles and motion graphics aren't much use unless they can move now there are countless ways to animate text in motion let's get acquainted with a few of them first up text behaviors instead of selecting them from the behaviors button it's better to browse through them in the library select the library if it's not already visible and go to behaviors text sequences let's try the subtle category which could probably have been called the not so gaudy that you can't actually use them for anything category but subtle probably fit better in the menus as you select them previews play in the viewer at the top left once you've found one that you like drag it onto your text in the canvas to change the timing just extend or shrink the behaviors bar in the timeline to have it start later or end earlier adjust the start or end offset in the HUD now most of these behaviors are actually presets of a single text behavior called the sequencer so let's stop for a minute and take a look at how the sequencer works we'll select and delete our current text behavior we'll also trim our play range little while we're here to help us preview our experiments in real time from the behaviors menu choose text animation sequence text now when the inspectors behavior tab adds some parameters you want to animate here we'll add opacity scale and rotation will also add tracking which is how far apart the characters are spaced let's scale up use tracking to increase the spacing of the characters and add a little rotation well trim out sequence behavior in the timeline to just a few frames and play back the characters automatically animate from there changed state back to their original state over the course of our behavior it feels a little stilted so we'll add some spread to overlap the animating in of each character and then we'll set the speed to ease in and out finally let's set the opacity to zero so that the letters start invisible and fade up over time for an out transition effect simply switch the sequencing option to two instead of from now the inspector is filled with additional options but by now you should have the idea and text animation isn't always about bringing text in or taking it off the screen sometimes the text just needs a little kinetic energy even while it's hanging around the screen waiting for someone to read it in such cases you can use a completely different kind of behavior the parameter behavior let's delete the sequence behavior and take a look head over to the properties inspector and right-click on position choose add parameter behavior Riggle your text is now wriggling all over the screen now that's a little too much wriggle so let's dial it down a bit in the HUD but maybe we want it to be frenetic so let's increase the frequency you can only adjust the frequency so far in the HUD but if you head over to the behaviors inspector you can drag in the number field to increase the value significantly these parameter behaviors can be added to just about any parameter in motion the possibilities are endless there are several other parameter behaviors including ones to drive the animation with sound or even MIDI sources as we've seen motion works great with content you bring in from elsewhere but it's also great at creating motion graphics elements from scratch these include generators particle effects and replicators we'll take a look at each in turn starting with a new project click the library button to open it go to generators than the image generator section again you can click to preview each generator if your lair tab is an open press f5 to open it and then drag a generator in here we'll choose caustics the layer gets placed so that it starts at the current playhead position so if your playhead isn't parked at frame one you may want to drag the layer back to start there alternately if you're playing back the timeline when you add something it'll automatically be added to the style of the timeline we'll also drag our play range out point to preview just a few frames in the HUD press f7 if it isn't visible play with the sliders until you find something you like now you can enhance the effect with filters here we'll throw in an overdrive effect you can always select the underlying generator and tweak it after you've added the filters for good measure we'll throw on a slit tunnel and play with its values a little with just a couple of filters we've created a unique visual element that looks nothing like the humble caustics generator we began with and depending on the power of your graphics card and computer at some point while piling on the filters your machine is going to lose the ability to play everything back in real time at that point simply press command R to create a ram preview of the timeline motion will bake all the filters into a single video stream that plays back effortlessly of course as soon as you make a change to any of your settings that baked version will no longer match your settings and motion will throw it away at that point you'd need to press command R again to create a new RAM preview another option is to adjust the quality settings found in the render menu this is also where you can enable motion blur which will significantly slow down your preview now to the fun stuff particles head over to the library and take a look at the countless presets here you can find everything from the Eye of Sauron to smoke - magic sparkling one dust feel free to choose any of the presets and play with them but right now we're going to build a particle effect from scratch to help give you an idea of how it all works we'll start with a new project and again drag our friend the butterfly into the shot we'll set the play range outpoint and stop playing the clip so how do we turn out butterfly into particles with a single click of the aptly-named make particles button in this case our particle is a butterfly think of a particle emitter as a cannon that fires off multiple copies of whatever you supply it with we're supplying it with a butterfly clip so that's what it spits out take a look at the HUD the birth rate determines how many particles are born every second set it down to one and like clockwork one butterfly is born every second life determines how long a particle will live before it disappears from the screen we'll set it to say one and a half seconds and the butterflies wink out of existence after 1.5 seconds of screen time you can ignore the emission range slider it's controls are duplicated by the radar light control under it which allows you to choose the direction and range of angles from which the butterflies will be emitted the size of the arrows sets the speed will go ahead and dial things back to something a little more interesting now if you look at the inspector the number of dials and sliders might send you reeling and we don't have time to go over each and every one but you'll find that between the intuitive names and the fact that you can see what they do is you adjust them in real time they're not really that difficult to master okay we will show you a couple of these first to stop your particles simply winking out of existence you can have them fade away instead just click on the opacity over life gradient to add a new swatch at the end and then one more a little before that click back to the one at the end to select it and then drag its opacity down to zero the gradient represents what happens to the particles opacity over its lifetime it starts live fully visible but right toward the end of its life it fades to fully transparent thanks to that zero opacity swatch we said at the very end of the gradient bar of course you could also add a little fade up at the beginning finally there are a couple of useful behaviors specific to particles with your emitter still selected choose behaviors particles scale over life you can choose in the HUD how big they are when they're born and how big they are when they die feel free to play with the other behaviors especially those in the simulation section that enable you to add forces like gravity and turbulence to your particles you may be surprised to find out that seemingly complex effects like swirls of smoke are actually created just like our butterfly instead of computing every single molecule of smoke and dust the entire effect is kind of faked by emitting a wispy image called a sprite and then just blending all the copies together until the thing looks like well smoke okay we'll cover one more way to create images inside a motion and that's replicators replicators are similar to particle emitters in that they take a single image and make lots of copies the difference is that all the copies live on the screen at once and are then animated usually with the sequence replicated behavior which is just like the text replicator we explored earlier with titles to give you a feel for it let's take this modulus preset and add rotation scale and color variance to the replicator we'll leave you to do more experimentation with the Replicators if you haven't realized it yet motion is designed to do animation procedurally and easily with behaviors and sequencers doing the heavy lifting but sometimes you just need good old-fashioned keyframes to fine-tune your motion it's simple here we'll take our butterfly clip again and this time we'll start at frame 1 and move the butterfly over to the left of the canvas in the inspector properties tab we simply click on the diamond keyframe button for position and a keyframe is set move down the timeline reposition the butterfly and a second keyframe is automatically added now we'll move in between the two key frames and set another if we click on that keyframe in the canvas we're given Bezier handles which will allow us to adjust the curvature of the motion path and that's it if you like you can enable motion blur in the render menu you remember to turn it off again if your performance starts to suffer in more complex compositions when a fine-tuned the animation even further fair enough enable the keyframe editor from the window menu and for an opto FX tile dopesheet approach to the key frames click here to enable keyframes in the timeline now as is the case with all these survival guides we just don't have room to do motions full feature set justice most of the particles and behaviors we've touched on also work in a fully capable 3d space complete with reflections and shadows then there's powerful tracking realtime green screening and of course all that integration goodness with Final Cut Pro 10 but as always you should now have enough understanding of the app to learn the rest so good luck and happy Moe graphing

Channel: Moviola

Views: 51,495

Keywords: Moviola, film, tv, entertainment, industry, hollywood, editing, webinar, movies, apple motion, graphics, tutorial, apple, motion

Id: Vy8TlKhAzPw

Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019