Intro to Dropzones - Apple Motion Professional Training 04 by AV-Ultra

my name is Stanislaw Robert Luberda with AV-Ultra and today we're going to be talking all about introduction to drop zones in Apple motion. once we understand what drop zones are we're going to start putting them together here so every video that we have here is technically a drop zone the second part of this tutorial is going to be taking a look at putting something like this together so these Polaroids are all containing drop zones and I've just duplicated one and then animated it here onto my scene so let's go ahead and get started let's talk about what a drop zone is a drop zone is basically a special kind of layer so if I go to object and I go to a new drop zone or shift command D I can create a drop zone so this is my drop zone and what a drop zone is is basically a placeholder so if I have this let's say sitting on my scene for exactly 10 seconds I could drop something in here let's say I've got some of this video here from shoot I did a couple years ago and I can just grab any clip here and drag it into my drop zone and you'll notice as soon as I highlight over that and I want to place it on here I've got this yellow border that pops up and it's waiting to accept it here since I dropped in a clip that's only six seconds long it trimmed my drop zone down and that's good because if it was longer that it would just be empty space so now I've got this drop zone it's got some video and some audio playing in here big deal so another reason why I want to use this is I can easily swap out items now this is a completely different video that's occupying the same thing now this becomes really useful when we start creating complex compositions so let's take a quick look this example here in this I've got just a couple different layers here I'm going to collapse this down so we don't have to take a look at that and I've got a series of different animated pieces here that are across the top I've got my text if you're looking for information on how to create this kind of text or some of these boxes that are animating on I recommend checking out my other tutorials introduction to behaviors and introduction to keyframes that I've got online as well otherwise let's move on here and talk about these drop zones so the way I have this particular complete out here is I have a series of different wipes that happen that basically hide when I transition from one scene to another so you can see I've got this animating kind of building on and then as soon as this wipes that away I've got my second drop zone you can see that I have them there so let's get started with creating this stuff here so now I just have a blank canvas so to speak I've got all these different animations happening but I don't have anything in my scene here now I can just place some of these clips right into my scene here and this will get the job done so if I go ahead and I move this group underneath everything else and we'll just call this video layers this will do the same thing and it'll drop it in for the whole duration so you can see what's happening there but I want different scenes in here and I want to be able to easily replace these clips so I'm going to get rid of that and what I'm going to do is create a new drop zone layer and I want this to start right about here I can start seeing some of that video and through here so I'm going to go to object and new drop zone and right away you can see it creates it from beginning all the way to the end of my file here not what I want I want it to end at this scene here and so I'm going to click it and hit o and I'm going to go ahead I'm going to duplicate it right away and now we have a drop zone copy and I'm going to just drag this guy I to the end of that first one and now I've got another one here it says drop zone copy and I'm going to continue doing this actually stretch this guy out one more frame you can see how that's filling that scene up there and we'll duplicate it again and to duplicate I'm just hitting command D and now I've got another copy and we'll do this one more time so I'm just stretching this guy out and duplicate him and I want him to be wiped away at the end so I'm just again retiming him and I'm just going to rename these so we have drop zone and we'll call this one drop zone one this one drop zone - drop zone three and drop zone four now all I have to do is grab some my clips and drop them right into my drop zone so I can just go right on to the next one here notice I've already got these already labeled and I'm just going to drop that in there go on to my next scene drop that one in there and then my final one here what if I want to change the frame in which that it's dropping in because by default what it's going to do is grab the first frame of this particular clip and drop that into my timeline in my drop zone and they may not be what I want but you'll notice that I can't really change the video file in here I don't really can see that so if I hold on to alt option you'll notice that I get a little slip slide tool and this will let me offset or change where I'm pulling that clip from so as an example here I can take this clip here and slide it over maybe so we don't have the scary guy here and go to a right about here and so now I can review this and same with this one here maybe I don't want her title there and so I'm just retiming this so we can see some of the actual brushwork here and I think that one's okay and this one is okay so again the benefit of this is that I can go ahead and I can replace any of these clips really pretty easily without a lot of trouble here so maybe I want to replace this last clip here with this clip well I can just drag and drop it right on there so I can just replace that clip and fix that offset so that's great if I want to have something that fills the whole scene but a lot of times that's not exactly what I want instead what I want to do is have a drop zone fill a specific area in another scene I've got here you'll notice that I've got some video playing in some my clips and this is actually a drop zone but I also have some regular pictures here so what I've got here is I've just got a picture of a floor here and I've added a nice little vignette to it and what I'm going to do is I want a series of Polaroids to be falling onto my scene so I've just dragged in this picture of this Polaroid here and it doesn't matter you know that it's not perfect you can see I've got some white edges in here and that's okay because what I'm going to do is just mask out that extra edge here so I'm just going to use my mask tool and I'm just drawing around it here and now that's pretty good so I can click off of there and there is my Polaroid in fact I can probably work with that just a little bit more so maybe I can get in here and and at these points a little tighter for our purposes that's pretty good I want text be on every bottom of my pole right here and so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to create a text layer in the same group as my polaroid image and I'm just going to drag the sound and I'm going to just write out a text layer one and it's really hard to see there on the white so let's change that to a black font and Center it and make that just a little larger now the last thing I want to do is I want a drop zone to appear in this black space here so I'm going to go to object and create a new drop zone and you'll notice right away it makes it the same size as my whole composition again that what I want but because this is acting just like a regular layer I can actually scale this down and I just want this to fit in there and that's pretty close and I'm also going to go ahead and put a mask on there so again I'm going to take this rectangular mask tool and just kind of draw this out and let's work with that just a little bit more and so now I've got a drop zone and a text layer on my polaroid here and so I'm just going to call this layer here drop zone one since that's what it is I'm going to collapse it down and I'm going to want this to take up the entire timeline here one last thing I want to do is I just want to add a little bit of a reflection shape so I'm just going to quickly draw this out and just so that way it catches a little light and you'll notice right now it's not showing up and the reason is is because they're technically in a 3d layer space we haven't gotten into 3d GS yet what I need to do is go into my inspector in my properties and just change this number to let's say zero and I can take a look at my other layers here and I can see they're occupying a 1.5 and that's obviously very very bright that's not exactly what I want I'm going to drag my opacity down to let's say 10% and I'm going to feather out that shape all right so it looks like it's just casting a tiny bit of reflection there even that's a little bright still at 10% so maybe I'll take that down to 7 or 8 and that should be good all right so now that I've got my original drop zone in here it's one whole group so all of this is one object so to speak it's almost like imagine a pre-comp I want to animate this in a little bit of a 3d space here so I have my 3d layer turned on and I know I wanted to end up out here but I want this to be just a bit smaller maybe right about there and I'll probably give it a tiny bit of rotation something like that so it looks like there and now I'm going to animate backwards so I'm going to turn on my rotation keyframe I've got my position keyframe and I'm going to go down to zero seconds and I'm going to pull this out in see space so it's a little closer to the camera and I'm also going to move this off to the side here right so when I play this back it should rotate and fall into place now I could finesse that a little bit more by opening up my keyframe editor and just right-clicking these last ones and we'll just ease that a little bit so we can see what that looks like so now if I go ahead and I play this back we can see that that's animating and sliding into my scene here so if I want to create more of these all I need to do is duplicate it and move this over a little bit so now I've moved this over and I can adjust these keyframes so i'll just go to these keyframes here open up my properties and figure out where I want this to end up I don't want it to end up in the same exact spot I'm going to need this on top of the other one so I'm going to change my Z position to 1 so it is stacked on top of it and let's have it rotate maybe this way and I don't want it starting from the same spot so I'm going to go to my first keyframe and just maneuver it say this way and we'll rotate it the other direction there so now I've got my scene where one comes in and the rest come in and after I go ahead and I create a whole bunch of those you're left with something that looks like this if I want to change any of my text layers I can just open up any one of my drop zone groups and open up that text so here's my a V ultra tutorials I can double click that and change this to text layer and you'll notice that they're all animating in the same exact way so I'm going to go ahead and play that back and you can see there's my Polaroids falling onto the scene there and if I want to add anything to it in this case I've got a series of some animal pictures here I'm just going to go to the very end where I can kind of see a bunch of these and we're just going to drag some of these pictures on there now what if we're in a situation where we put an object or video or a picture in here but it's not lining up right for example our drop zones are typically in sixteen by nine and in this case our Polaroids are more like in a 4/3 well I can go to any one of my particular drop zones in this case believe this is drop zone five let's take a look and I can go to my drop zone layer here so you can see there's my drop zone layer and I'm going to go into our inspector and under image I can actually pan this left or right or I can zoom this out so if I have something that's very large notice I can reframe that to make it fit so if I have a logo that's something very very large I can actually shrink it down or if I have a video that's very very large I can still shrink it down the very last thing I did here was I added a little bit of a camera movement so my camera is actually panning through this scene and it uses a little bit of depth of field so you can see how this is slightly out of focus right here as its falling down so there you go there's a quick easy way to get started with drop zones I find them to be extremely useful when I'm making templates for things that may be on a weekly or monthly or anything that's going to be repeated or reused again in the future it's a great way to reuse some of the stuff that you've already created without having to dig into different files and start replacing things again my name is Stanislaw Robert Luberda with AV-Ultra and this has been introduction to drop zones in Apple motion and hopefully you found this tutorial useful

Channel: AV-Ultra

Views: 58,004

Keywords: Apple Motion Dropzones, motion 5 drop zones, apple motion drop zone, apple motion dropzone, apple motion drop zones, Apple Motion training, Stanislaw robert luberda, Keyframe editor, Final Cut Pro x, Sony, Apple Motion, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Dropzone, Apple Training, tutorial, Keyframes, motion 5, apple motion tutorial, Av ultra, apple motion 5 drop zone, apple motion 4 drop zone, apple motion training course, motion

Id: OEhVInhXz9g

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2016