[Benjamin Coppock]

Thanks for the tutorial. I haven’t used the “transform keyframes” tool, and I haven’t used the “repeat” feature for keyframes, either. Very helpful stuff!

But alas, I described the situation poorly. It’s not so much my animation that repeats, it’s more a “style” with slightly varied animations that are all a little complex.

The project is a demo of someone interacting with a hypothetical tablet-based app. There’s an object spinning on screen, and when the user tap that object the object grows a bit in size, reverses it’s spin, and changes color. Then when they let go, the object shrinks, reverses it’s spin again, and goes back to its “normal” color.

Since each interaction with the on-screen object involves dragging it to a new location, it seems to me that each animation is slightly unique. Plus, I think the spinning is messing me up. I just don’t know how to pull that off cleanly without a behavior, and then the fact that the spinning is changing speed and direction means I also need keyframes…quite a mess.

All of this plus the fact that I wanted to give myself several more seconds in the middle of the project in order to demo this particular style of user interaction before moving on to demoing another idea.

Thanks again for your ideas and responses. Really appreciated.

[Benjamin Coppock]

Your response is helpful, Andy — I really don’t think there’s a way to do what I hoped.

Not sure exactly how to give an example, but in my project yesterday I was asked to “just repeat that animation a few more times.” But the particular segment was right in the middle of my project. Just repeating what I had previously done wasn’t as simple as the requestor thought because I had a mix of keyframe-based animation, behavior-base animation, some objects that lasted through the whole project, and other objects that came and went. Kind of a nightmare to jump in and add several more seconds in the middle of the project.

I was hoping there was a way to select everything after a certain frame and just push it all to the right. I realize that would potentially mean altering the length of certain animations and the life of objects in the timeline (because their out point would be moving farther from their in point), but it would have been really handy to do that…and easier to clean up the small amount of breakage it might have caused. On the other hand, moving keyframes (or moving objects in my timeline) literally guaranteed I’d have lots of breakage that was confusing to fix.

I got through it, but it wasn’t fun! 🙂

Thanks for your answer.

[Benjamin Coppock]

Garth, did you end up figuring anything more out about this? I’m having the same issue.

Seems to work fine when I “send to compressor” but I’m not familiar enough with Compressor to know how to create a DVD image with it (not sure it’s actually possible).

For now I’ll try exporting to ProRes 422, creating a new project, and then burning to DVD…kind of annoying.

Let me know if you figured it out. Thanks.

[Benjamin Coppock]

Bummer. I was beginning to think that was the only thing left.

Thank you for the reply, Mark.

[Benjamin Coppock]

I’m getting lots of errors, but here’s the latest.

After taking “forever” to export a short segment, it then fails at the very end. This was in my log at the time it failed:

4/29/12 1:13:18.420 PM [0x0-0xaf0af].com.apple.motionapp: Helium ERROR : C++ teardown in progress!!
4/29/12 1:13:18.420 PM [0x0-0xaf0af].com.apple.motionapp: Accessing Helium during static objects destruction!!

[Benjamin Coppock]

1) Select as close as you can to the first (or last) frame of the clip.

2) Then hold the ‘K’ key and tap the ‘J’ key to move back one frame at a time (or hold the ‘K’ key and tap the ‘L’ key to move forward one frame).

3a) Once you’re on the very first or last frame of your clip, check the opacity by opening the Inspector (the little ‘i’ icon on the far right)

3b) Select the video tab

3c) Scroll down until you find the “compositing” section.

When I was having this trouble, that’s where I found the opacity slider that fixed it for me. Hope that helps!

[Benjamin Coppock]

I was having the same trouble.

Turns out the opacity was set to 0 for just the first and last frames of my clip. And no matter how I trimmed the clip, the opacity would always be 0 on the first and last frame. My *guess* is that this is due to one of the effects I had applied and then removed. Perhaps it’s a bug. Not sure.

Anyway, go to the first or last frame (when you select it, the viewer should show black) and then go check your opacity. If that’s what you already did, then sorry to point out what may have been obvious. It confused me, though!

😉