[Don Smith]

Andy! You enabled me to find the solution I was looking for! And, I’m sorry to say it wasn’t the Ken Burns effect. But, by making me look ‘over here’, I saw the solution. Thank you, thank you.

By making me think about the Ken Burns effect and seeing that it didn’t work for the situation I described above, it made me curious to look at the Crop Tool in that same Crop Effect Mode where you find the Ken Burns effect.

Who wudda thunk it?

Turns out, this great truth was hidden in plain sight.

Eureka! It did in a heartbeat everything I needed to effect the moves I described above!

I select the Crop Effect mode, then the Crop mode (ignoring Trim and Ken Burns), move a few seconds down the timeline and set a keyframe at full-frame. Move a couple of seconds further, set another keyframe and form the crop rectangle around the part of the video I wanted to zoom to. Move a few seconds further down the timeline so as to hold that position for a while, set another keyframe to end the hold, move another second or two, and set another keyframe to re-frame to where I wanted the focus of the video to move to. In less than a minute I had the multiple moves I needed without using keyframe trickery in the Transform mode.

Smooth, expected moves! No ‘waving’!

(This also lead to my discovery that these forms of cropping are also available in the Inspector via a drop-down list in the Crop section, but you have to set individual keyframes for top, bottom, left and right. That said, its a more visual method of re-framing.)

Many, many thanks. I’ve now met my daily goal of learning something new.

Don Smith
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[Don Smith]

Here’s a better way to sum up the problem with multiple keyframes; The first two go against logic and require to be smooth with Bezier handles aligned with the path. Once I set a keyframe one frame past the second keyframe, then ALL OTHER keyframes work as expected! No converting! (at least in my experience). If I’m correct about this, something is seriously wrong in this area.

Maybe this condition only involves keyframes that include a change in scale. It’s possible. I know from past experience with FCP7 it would also ‘wave’ because while the move was linear the scale was Bezier (smooth). I investigated that possibility but can find no way to set the interpolation independently. I thought the video animation pop-up (Control-V) gave me control of just scale with the disclosure triangle set to scale but that’s not the case apparently. It only gives me the opportunity to move the keyframes independently both X and Y or either one but it doesn’t allow me to change the interpolation.

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[Don Smith]

I spent HOURS trying to get it to work reliably and was on the verge of giving up when I discovered my extra-keyframe-one-keyframe-after-the-second-keyframe with the first two keyframes SMOOTH and their Bezier handles aligned with the path trick, but once I found that trick, the system worked every time.

Don Smith
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[Don Smith]

Experimenting further, you’re right, of course, Andy.

I can see now that in lasso’ing and moving the group of effects, the effect to the furthest right must have ‘slipped off the end’, meaning it’s connection to the to the clip below was left pointing to nothing. That causes ALL the clips that were lasso’ed to go to the end of the clip below and line up end-to-end.

While it caught me by surprise, I’m sure that, somewhere, we can make use of that quirk.

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[Don Smith]

Hi Andy.. you’re very kind to write back with such detail.

To shorten a message that was already too long I left out some circumstances of my copying-pasting multiple (stacked) generator effects. I had six of them in two stacks of three effects above a clip in the primary storyline. The two stacks were close to each other. I needed to move them into a composite clip (having changed my mind as editors often do). I lasso’ed, copied, stepped into the composite clip and pasted. They pasted just fine but weren’t quite in the right place. I lasso’ed the six effects and moved the group slightly. They were still over and connected to the same clip below. On release, the group of six effects went to the end of the clip below and spread out end-to-end. Undo. Repeat. Same result. Only when I made the six generators into their own composite clip could I get the group to move and the effects inside stay in their relative positions. I apologize for the more brief description yesterday. I thought that all that would be needed to know was that I attempted to copy and paste a group of effects. Clearly, all the detail was needed because there’s something else at play here.

Thank you for the tip of holding the SHIFT key with the Selection tool to reposition clips vertically in the timeline.

I knew that the stills had a default length of 4 seconds but thats not how I was getting them into the storyline. The FCP7 act of just dragging them in wasn’t working, and selecting them to use Q or E would give me a random range. I guess I must double-click on the clip first so I get the full range.

You are certainly correct in saying that I should build the effects above the primary clip and THEN make those effects into the composite clip and I can’t tell you why, sitting at home now and away from the work computer, I had to do the composite clip first. I’m thinking that I had the idea at the time that I knew I would be applying an effect to the composite clip and so would need to build inside the composite, but away from the computer and seeing your good advice, of course, I need to build first and then composite.

Call this workflow-birthing if you would. As I said in my original message, I’m a huge fan of FCPX/Motion and the boundless creative possibilities.

Thanks, Andy, for your time. Your solid advice sometime back to solve a problem in my Motion project where I wanted the segments of a VU meter to blink on fully instead of just wiping on (like I had seen in other VU meter effects) allowed me to create this: https://newsvideo.com/vud/

Don Smith
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[Don Smith]

Just thinking out loud here ’cause my Motion 5 is tied up rendering…

Clearly, the shots are close by your description. Just a thought.. overlap the last couple of seconds of one shot over the the first seconds of the second shot. Lets say the new clip is on top. First, half-dissolve the top clip (bring opacity down) so that you can see how it aligns with the bottom clip. get the top clip as close as you can. Then, distort the corners of the upper clip, one corner at a time, until you hone in on the alignment. Once clear of the old shot, if needed, keyframe the corners to gently go back to where they were.

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[Don Smith]

Well, Mark, I wasn’t so crazy after all.

Now, I buit a simple arrow in Motion 5 and it animates in its length. I set a Mandatory Build-Out marker just after the animation completes.

Exported as a generator, it works fine. Publish a few parameters and save again and it no longer animates on. Unpublish all published parameters and it works again. Start adding back a published parameter at a time and it stopped animating at one point. I’m not naming that parameter because it’s not consistently at fault. It appears to be some magic combination of publishing parameters in some magic order because now I’m back with a working arrow but the published parameters are the same, just enabled in a different order.

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[Don Smith]

Thank you for your trouble Mark. It was because I re-built my startup volume from scratch that I was rescuing templates from Motion 4 by opening them in Motion 5 and saving them as templates.

My thinking was ‘what could be wrong with a simple circle?’ Well, as simple as it is, it was problematic saving that Motion 4 template through Motion 5. No Drop Zones to publish first per one of your tutorials. Yet, it wouldn’t work right. I mean, there’s just one Group, and one Circle in the group. Nothing else.

When you reported that it worked for you, I deleted the circle and re-created it. Now it works fine. Thank you. But, what’s the difference? I’m still at a loss as to why a simple circle drawing on would not translate. Chalk it up to the mysteries of graphic creation I guess. I’ve taken templates like a digital vu meter, an analog vu meter, and lower-third animations from M4 into M5 and thus into FCPX without a problem.

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[Don Smith]

Thank you for replying but no joy. You were close though, and your answer prompted me to remember a keyboard shortcuts page online where I found that it was shift-control-r to resume rendering (the preferences for Playback were correct. Go figure). So, I did solve my problem thanks to you.

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[Don Smith]

Wish I could delete a message when I realize that the problem is a short between the headphones. 🙁

When I first bought FCPX I changed the Overwrite command to F10 like it is in FCP7. It seemed like a good idea then but I forgot about it and now wondered why the ‘D’ overwrite command didn’t work as the tutorial said it would.

I should have followed my previous philosophy of never changing the keyboard (except to add something to an empty key). Some people advocated making FCP7 act like an Avid but I resisted that, feeling that it would make it difficult to follow tutorials. Yet, I didn’t listen to myself and changed the Overwrite command in FCPX and now its come back to bite me in the back end.

Thanks for your reply. It made me realize my wayward ways.

Don

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