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ahhhh…. I hate motion
I just spent the better part of an hour and a half writing masking boring pictures and text with stupid financial information. I was saving every three or four seconds b/c i had lost 30 min of work b/c motion crashed and i hadn’t saved. So i had just finished copying text layers to go on top of the 20 different slides. Then the hard part of changing out all the boring financial numbers. So i finish the last one. And save it. I then open up my layers on the timeline only to find out that all my text layers are greyed out. tthey have all completely dissapeared from the timelin. I tried scrolling through it to find them but no luck. They show up in the layers tab and have the correct names and the thumbnail has the right info but the layers are gone. I was only able to locate one of them, and here’s the great part. This one text is only one frame long and is completly invisible on the timeline and is only on the first frame of where it should be. What a waste of my time. now i have to go through the entire project again, which means it will be delievered to the client late. Thanks alot motion. Sorry. I needed to vent.
-matt -
2 Replies
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Motion is extremely stable on my dual 1.0 GHz MAC. There is not one thing I have ever asked it to do, that failed. Sure, learn to Save – SAve – SAVE and often but depending on which MAC you are using, Motion 1.01 should be rock solid!
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I will venture a guess as to what happened – is it possible that you were located on the 1st frame of the project, and inadvertently hit the “o” key (this sets the out point of all selected items to the current time) and accidentally trimmed a whole bunch of elements to be only 1 frame long? I suspect this may be what happened because you said that the elements were “greyed out”, which Motion uses to indicate that an object is still in the project but not active at the current frame, and also you mentioned that the one you did find in the timeline was only 1 frame long. If you have a really, really long project duration, the timebars for your text objects may be extremely thin when you are zoomed out in time (perhaps as thin as 1 pixel if it’s extremely long).
I would suggest that you re-open the project and drill open all the layers in the timeline, then select the greyed out ones on the left-side of the timeline list and press “shift-i” to go to the in point of those elements. The time marker should jump forward in time, then you can drag the timeline zoom slider (the slider at the lower part of the timeline list) to zoom in and see your object and check its duration.
If the objects are still there, and I suspect that they are if they still appear in the Layers tab, you can simply drag the out points to put them back again, or place the time marker to where they should end and hit “o”.
I hope that steers you in the right direction. Let us know what you find.
— Greg
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