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Activity Forums Apple Motion Creating a logo for printing from Motion?

  • Creating a logo for printing from Motion?

    Posted by Shea a.j. Comfort on November 30, 2012 at 6:36 am

    Hello Everyone,

    I was working in Motion 5 to create an opening logo graphic sequence for my band’s video’s. I am actually happy with how it turned out. I have selected a freeze frame that I now would like to export as a graphic file so we can make T-shirts printed with the graphic (cafepress.com). What is the best way to export/create a large, smooth, high-quality graphic file from a Motion sequence freeze-frame? Can I do it with Motion only, or should I export as PSD and then do any adjusting there?

    Thank you for any help,

    ~Shea A.J. Comfort

    Shea a.j. Comfort replied 13 years, 5 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Anders Larsen

    November 30, 2012 at 9:44 am

    If you are using all vector graphics, you can get quite a large image out of motion. Should be plenty big for most print purposes. If there are bitmap images in your design, their size will be the limiting factor.

    What you should do is make you canvas size as large as Motion will (depends on you graphics card), then scale up your logo to fill the canvas.
    Now select share>save current frame.
    In the dialog that comes up choose tiff or psd, and remember to export color+alpha.

    You should now have a nice, high resolution image.

    Pro tip: if you want to do more elaborate adjustments to the image in Photoshop, you can export the different groups in your motion composition as individual images (simply by turning groups on and of and exporting) and then bring them into Photoshop as layers.

  • Jason Watson

    November 30, 2012 at 2:57 pm

    I would suggest recreating the logo in either Photoshop or Illustrator if you can, especially if you are planning on printing t-shirts. Motion exports images at 72 dpi, which, depending on the size of the artwork, complexity, size of the art of the shirt, particular shirt vendor, etc., might be too low of a resolution and will result in pixelization. It definitely will not be crisp or smooth.

    To actually make this work, you’d need the frame size in Motion to be quite a bit bigger than the size you needed for print, so that when you bring it into a Photoshop document set to the correct size it is big enough to not force you to scale up the exported artwork.

    There could be an option to export from Motion at a higher resolution, but I am not aware of it.

  • Stephen Smith

    November 30, 2012 at 4:38 pm

    If you can export your logo to Adobe Illustrator then you can convert it over to a vector image so you can scale it’s size with not lose of quality. Here is a tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AXyjWcj2Ds Keep in mind that this technique is not full proof.

    Stephen Smith
    Utah Video Productions

    Check out my Motion Training DVD

    Check out my Vimeo page

  • Shea a.j. Comfort

    November 30, 2012 at 7:13 pm

    Hmmmm, that’s all good info. Thank you Everyone for your answers.

    ~Shea

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