Doyle Rockwell
Forum Replies Created
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Howdy,
If you want to edit an already-created Motion “clip” (something you’ve already sent to Motion) then right-click on it and choose ‘Open in Editor’. That will open it in Motion.
You can’t embed Motion projects within Motion projects, so sending something twice doesn’t work.
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Heya,
Due to the GPU-rendered nature of Motion, you can’t distribute the jobs to multiple machines using Compressor.
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Heya,
You can use an image mask to accomplish this. It defaults to using the alpha channel of the reference image, but you can just as easily set it to use the luminance: Image Mask.
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Heya,
You can use an image mask to accomplish this. Just be aware of the ‘Stencil’ option, which you may not want to leave on in this case: Image Mask.
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Hey Matt,
It sound like you might have brought in an image sequence, by accident. If you have a bunch of files with sequential names, like filename001.png, filename002.png, filename003.png and so on, Motion can collapse them and allow you to bring them in as a clip (image sequence). Treated as a clip, it would have a maximum length, etc.
To make sure that you’re not bringing in an entire sequence, just toggle off the image sequence filter button in the bottom-right corner of the File Browser. It’s right next to the Add a New Folder button.
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Heya,
As I understand it, media is first cached in system RAM, then sent to the GPU when needed. Motion will try to cache every frame it encounters in the system RAM, but the GPU RAM is more likely to be turning over. Sending from system RAM to the GPU is fast.
As for whether more system RAM would help: well, he’s already got 5GB, which is pretty boffo. The issue is the scope of media he described. Let’s assume his video sources are NTSC SD, at 720×486. That means that each frame takes up around 1MB of memory (720x486x3). Multiply that times 45 different clips and you’re talking 1.3GB for every 30 frames. As you can see, he’s bound to run out of system RAM pretty quick, at that rate. Which means Motion will have to drop not-in-use frames out of cache (i.e. not the frame you’re currently on) and reload them from disk, later. And that’s where the slowdown happens.
The thing is, any app will balk at the kind of project he describes. You can get the work done, it just won’t be playing back real quick. This is where project optimization comes in: pre-rendering certain elements, resizing source media, etc. Even a $700/hr Flame operator has his/her henchmen prep all their elements before a client session, so as to make it all seem like magic 🙂
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Hey Nick,
All of Lee’s suggestions are excellent, especially the one about prepping your source media to make sure it’s around the same size as you want it to appear onscreen.
As for the performance: you mentioned 40+ video clips that comprise the logo. Motion doesn’t stream like FCP; it caches the source media into RAM and then sends it lickety-split to the GPU and screen. If you’ve got 40+ SD-or-higer video clips, that’s a lot of footage to cache. Most likely, Motion is running out of system memory space and so has to constantly toss frames and read new ones from disk. If it’s hitting your disk on a regular basis, that will always slow things down.
Your project sounds pretty macho!
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Hey Simon,
It sounds like you’re seeing artifacting from the extreme scale-down. Do you have the project’s render-quality set to Best? This forces better quality (smoother) filtering on transformed images. As with any app, though, performing a large scale-down on an image forces you to choose between sharp & chunky or smooth & blurry, depending on the filtering settings.
Try to have your source image be as close to its onscreen-needed size, as much as possible. Or, as you suggested, you can use a vector-based file, like an Illustrator file or PDF. The vector file can be rendered at whatever its screen-size is, so it would always look optimal.
To set the render quality to Best (if you haven’t), go to the ‘View’ menu in the Motion toolbar. You’ll find the render quality settings most of the way down. Keep in mind that Best mode incurs a performance penalty, so I’d only toggle it on to do checks and for final output.
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Hey,
Actually, that tab in the Inspector will read as ‘Group’ when a group is selected and ‘Media’ if a media object is selected. If you follow the steps in my previous post, you will see the appropriate checkbox.
Here’s a movie.
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Heya,
I see where the confusion lies: I wasn’t referring to the Fixed Resolution option on 2D groups. I was referring to the Fixed Resolution option on the footage settings for your AI file. After you’ve imported your AI file, do the following:
1. Select the image in the Layers List.
2. Press Shift+F to shortcut to the footage settings for the image (your AI file).
3. In the Media tab of the Inspector, uncheck the Fixed Resolution checkbox.This is similar to setting the footage interpretation settings on a piece of source media in FCP or AE. In this case, the Fixed Resolution option is specific to source footage that is vector-based.