Doyle Rockwell
Forum Replies Created
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Hey Richard,
You can certainly hand-animate the text to lock down its position in the scene, but it can be tedious (but often the best, too). What you are likely looking for is a motion-tracking tool that you can use to matchmove the text into the scene. Motion doesn’t have such a tool, but Shake and Adobe After Effects do. If you would like to keep your project in Motion, you can do the tracking in one of those apps and export the position data to Motion.
I have a couple of scripts (one for AE and one for Shake) that you can find here: https://www.motionsmarts.com/downloads.html
If you don’t own AE or Shake, you can download the trial versions and use them to do the tracking, then export the data to Motion.
Good luck with your project!
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Heya,
I just tried exporting a TGA sequence and the alpha came out fine. Maybe AE guessed the wrong alpha type for the sequence? Motion exports pre-multiplied with black.
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Or…I could actually pay attention to the names and realize that it was you who posted in the other forum. No one ever accused me of being sharp 😉
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Heya Ken,
This same problem was mentioned (with a solution) over on the Apple discussion forum: https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=415160&tstart=0
Check it out and see if it helps. Good luck!
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Heya,
It’s not a searching tool, as much as it’s a filtering tool. Motion has them in the File Browser, Library, Media, Layers List, etc. It allows you to quickly filter the list of items being shown, be it footage in the File Browser or a specific object in your project.
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Heya Richard,
It doesn’t sound like you’re doing anything wrong. The broadcast preview feature has never been touted as guaranteed realtime, frame-accurate playback. I head that the video output is being routed through Quicktime, so that may be causing just enough lag to mess up your framerate, even with the results cached in RAM.
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Heya Daisey,
I hate to spout the old line, but perusing chapter 12 of the manual (Using Shapes and Masks) would be of great use. The second page of the chapter gives a nice explanation of shapes vs masks, and shape-based masks vs image-based masks.
The drawing tools for shapes and shape-masks are the same, but a shape is an independent object with all sorts of properties (outline, fill, etc.), while a shape-mask is always the child-object of the object it is masking. You can, however, apply filters and behaviors to shape-masks, just like a regular shape.
Image masks are exactly that: a mask based on an image. Image masks are also child-objects, but they can use the output (image) of any other object in your project as the source for the mask. The mask can use any channel (or all channels) of the source image, so you can use the luminance of a black-and-white image, or the alpha, etc. Image masks can also have filters applied to them. In answer to your question: typically, when using an image as the source for an image-mask, you want to hide that image so that it doesn’t obscure what you’re masking. In fact, when you first plug the source image into the image mask, Motion will turn off the source image for you. This doesn’t affect Motion’s ability to “see” the image for use in the mask. Here’s an example:
Let’s say you have some footage of flames (like the ‘Fire Wall’ clip in the Content section of the Library) and you want to mask it with some text, giving you a dramatic type-treatment. You would select the fire clip in the Layers List and then go to Object->Add Image Mask. You then add some text, scale it and position it where you want the masking to be, and then drag-and-drop the text object into the image mask object (in the Layers List or Inspector). The text object will be automatically turned-off, and you will see the fire footage masked by the text. By default, the image mask uses the alpha channel of the mask source image, which the text does have. You’re then free to mess around with the text (reposition it, restyle it, etc.) as much as you want. Turning it back on (or off) will not affect the mask. If you want to replace the mask source image, just drop something else in.
And don’t forget, an object can have as many masks as you want, and the masks can interact with each other (add, subtract, intersect, etc).
Hope this long-winded explanation helps. Again, the manual covers all this (and more), and is quite readable (as opposed to the flame or Henry/HAL manuals, heh).
Good luck!
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Heya,
Are you dragging the backface image straight from the File Browser to the image-well? If so, that’s your problem. Any optional inputs (image-wells) for filters, image masks, particles, etc, require footage that has already been added to the project.
You can either drop the footage into the Layers List and disable it (to hide it), or you can drop the footage into the Media tab. The Media tab is like the clips bin in FCP: it associates footage with your project, but the footage isn’t necessarily IN your project. You can then drag stuff from the Media tab into the Canvas, Layers List, Timeline, image-wells, etc.
Hope this helps!
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Heya,
Also, double-clicking on a line/shape will shortcut you to the Edit Points mode.
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Good pointer, Bob! When video output is turned on, Motion has to read each image back off the GPU (which is a slow process) and then use Quicktime to pipe it out of your capture card, so it really slows things down. Also, try turning off the audio preview (the little speaker button next to Play), as that can also slow down playback.