[Burt Hazard]

You could check your clip’s Alpha Type setting in FCP.

[Burt Hazard]

It’s possible, but pretty tedious because you’d have to do it manually. Motion doesn’t have a text generator/behavior for it yet (Motion 3.5.1?).

Digital Heaven does have a counter plugin for FCP itself though ($20).

[Burt Hazard]

Hello again…yeah, I like this forum too.

In Motion proper you can’t really (yet); I suppose that could be a reason to buy After Effects! 🙂

In Shake, of course, there is a way to do this:

[Shake, so Motion folks will have to bear with us, or just ignore us, whichever is easier!]
1) Use a Reorder Node again to create your Shake z channel (rgbar)
2) Feed that into a DepthSlice Node
3) Then feed that into your main animation File-In node’s Mask input
4) Adjust center, lo, and hi parameters in DepthSlice to literally slice different sections of your animation, based on the depth data
5) Then in your main animation File-In, activate autoAlpha and add a File-Out and render with the Animation codec (colors+)

You’d have to do this several times obviously to get each depth layer, but then you could separately filter each one in Motion, then do the final composite back in Shake.

[Burt Hazard]

Yes, that’s right, the text behaviors will only work on text. You’ve probably already done this, but you could mimic the “Simple Fast Blur” with a combination of duplicate logo layers, animated blur and glow filters, and an animated mask to do the reveal. Specifically:

1) On the “background” logo layer, you could use an animated blur filter and a feathered mask to wipe it on.
2) On the “top, fancy fx” layer(s), you could add the color tint, animated glow and blur filters, animate a slight x-axis transform, and also use an add blending mode to get the “blobby” effect between maybe two top layers.

[Burt Hazard]

Pretty much matting/tracking and/or clone painting would be the only way to fix a problem like this and yes, for a 40 min. clip it would be a lot of work no matter what route you took.

The only good thing about your clip is that it has the solid white cyclorama in the background which would help in the creation of what is known as a “clean plate,” i.e. a lower layer that you would have a “clean” area (devoid of puppeteer heads) that you could reveal via masks. Your friend is right about some sections of the footage, you might be able to get away with simpler garbage mattes that would be tracked to the tops of their heads. In other words, garbage mattes wouldn’t have to be an exact roto shape if just compositing against the plain white background. Where you will run into more work, real rotoscoping basically, is where their heads intersect with the puppets ( in this, you could maybe try the new Shape Track Points behavior as well). Maybe you could also try a luma key to isolate both puppets and heads from the background, but of course you’d still have the roto the intersect borders.

(I’m always wary of an “Apple pro” who would think cleaning up 40 minutes of footage would be easy; sounds like a wanna-be to me.)

[Burt Hazard]

Well several things.

I think we’ve all experienced sluggish performance with Motion, basically it requires a really hyped-up graphics card to run properly. I literally get the same performance running Motion 2 on a G4 Powerbook and Motion 3 on a Quad G5 (both with Tiger). 🙂

The spotty rendering in Motion sounds like a RAM issue; you might check out your RAM sticks.

The other issue may be that you are exporting movies in the Animation codec; at its highest setting it’s essentially uncompressed/lossless. So when you render it in FCP, you’re probably compressing it to a much more manageable codec.

[Burt Hazard]

Is it smoke footage? If it is, then add a rectangular mask to it and adjust the feather parameter.

[Burt Hazard]

Behaviors>Simulation>Drag

[Burt Hazard]

You could first use an Analyze Motion behavior on your background clip, then apply a Match Move behavior to your foreground, and then drag your Analyze Motion behavior (with embedded data) from Layers into the Match Move’s Source well (Inspector>Behaviors>Match Move>Source).

[Burt Hazard]

Well yeah, just like in AE you can do reveals by animating Motion’s masks over time.

But an easier method is to use the Write-On behavior: Add Behavior>Shapes>Write On

And you can also use the Sequence Paint behavior if your using Motion 3’s new Paint Strokes feature.

And there’s even a script for converting Illustrator shapes to Motion shapes: https://www.motionsmarts.com/downloads.html 🙂