[Anders Larsen]

Perhaps you could stick a big piece of polycarbonate in front the opening.
That would hold in the bottles, so they don’t pour out. But you would have to be very careful about lighting in order to avoid reflections, a polarizer might help with that too.

Just a suggestion, I have never tried this though, so I make absolutely no guarantees.

Good luck, and let us know how it went.

[Anders Larsen]

Take a look at Andy Neil’s exploding text tutorial, and try changing the emitter to something smokey.

https://library.creativecow.net/neil_andy/Exploding-Text_Apple-Motion_1/1

[Anders Larsen]

Does the dancer move around enough, that you can piece together a complete clean plate from parts of the background?

If so, use Photoshop to create the plate.
Richard Harrington has an exellent tutorial on how to do that here:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/harrington_richard/photoshop_averaging_video_frames/video-tutorial

If the dancer casts a lot of shadows and reflections, that might give you some grief, later in the process, but this should get you a good piece of the way.

[Anders Larsen]

Don’t worry about the processor. For Motion it’s the graphics card that counts.
Oh, and also the amount of memory, but RAM is cheap and can be installed later.

[Anders Larsen]

Hi Sean

I’ve had this problem a lot in the past.
My solution was to restart the computer and try again a few times, sometimes it would take 3-4 attempts before it magically just worked.

Recently I put an extra 8GB of RAM in my system, and I have not had the problem since.

[Anders Larsen]

As I read this you moved the hard drive from your old Mac to the new one – correct?
In theory this should work just fine with MacOS X (and it sometimes does), but in reality you are setting yourself up for a world of hurt.

Do you have an empty drive in your system? If so, try doing a clean install of OS X and FCS on that and boot from it. If that works, I’ll bet you that the problem stems from moving the drive over.

[Anders Larsen]

Always happy to help.
Care to share your final result with us?

[Anders Larsen]

If you keep the full resolution you will have room to pan and zoom in your footage.
But, of course, rendering will eat up more processor cycles.

I would say try it out a full res, and if the files become to heavy for your system, you can consider scaling it down. Otherwise just enjoy the flexibility of that gigantic resolution.

[Anders Larsen]

If the animation you want to do can be done using Sequence Replicator, then you can probably get a long way by replicating your circle and setting the “Shape” parameter of the replicator to “Image” and the dropping your footage onto the image well.
I did a really quick example of that here:

Replicator LCD

You can take a look at my Motion files here:
1640_replicatorlcd.zip

Hope that helps

[Anders Larsen]

Hi Andy

That is incredibly helpful.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to look at my files.