[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Tone,

If the image is scaled down, you might want to try turning up the quality of your anti-aliasing, found in the project settings (Cmd+J).

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya Bob,

The tricky bit is that the Motion projects might use a number of media files, not just a single background clip, so it’s not a straight one-in one-out switch. You’d need the ability to browse and replace any of the media in the embedded Motion project, so you might as well switch to Motion, anyways.

All that being said, I can see how that if you’re doing something really simple like a lower-third over a single clip, it would be nice to do a swap.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

The Indent filter (found in the Stylize category) can do some pretty flexible beveling. Using the optional input for the Height Map, you can achieve simple bevels, embossed textures, etc.

Good luck!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey David,

What is your project’s Antialiasing Method set to? You can check it by pressing Cmd+J and go to the Render Settings tab.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya David,

Motion is limited by the maximum texture size of your graphics card (GPU). ATI cards and some of the oldest Nvidia cards are limited to 2K (2048×2048), but recent NVidia cards (last two generations) can go to 4K (4096×4096).

Even if you’re in FCP, FCP is calling Motion’s render engine to process your project, so you’re limited to what your GPU can do.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

Like Noah said, shooting this would probably get you the best look, though controlling the seeping would be an interesting challenge. The tricky bit about this is the look, not so much the animation. Paper, especially the kind used for currency, has a particular look it gets when it’s saturated with liquids. Combine that with the tricky color properties of up-close blood, and it gets more difficult. All that being said, if you’re willing to go through the heavy trial-and-error to get the look/color right, I can make a suggestion for the animation:

Use the replicator tool to create blobby text (not 3d blobs). There’s a write-up on it here: https://motionsmarts.com/tutorials/pain/pain1.html

By animating the feather of the replicator’s source shape (probably a circle), you can cause the blobs to spread from individual pinpoints into full-blown blotches. I’d use a few different replicators, layered together, because you don’t want all the blobs to grow at the same rate, plus you can fade them separately and use different blend modes. This won’t be speedy, because creating legible blob-text requires hundreds or thousands of replicator points (times the number of replicators). Here’s a quick example of three stages: https://www.motionsmarts.com/images/misc/murderbill.jpg

As you can see, though, the believability of the bottom stage isn’t too good, because the color/wetness is tricky to accurately reproduce. That’s where the elbow-grease comes in 😉

Hope this helps. Good luck with your project!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya Kim,

I put a little bit of explanation on the download page, but maybe I should add a ReadMe to the .zip file. What you are downloading is NOT a project file. It’s a preset file (XML) that contains some layers, behaviors, filters, etc. Create a new SD-res project and drag the preset file from the File Browser into the Layers List, just as you would do with footage. To use the effect, just drop some footage into the bottom nested layer (it’s labeled).

Any objects or group of objects in Motion can be dragged out into the File Browser, and Motion saves out a little XML snippet that contains all their info (properties, animation, etc.) This makes it easy to create and animate something and then send it to someone else. You can also drag that stuff out into the Library, creating presets (anything from a simple filter setting to a massive collection of objects) that you can apply any time in the future.

Hope this helps!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya Scott,

I saw your post and thought, “What a great challenge!” Motion doesn’t have an “aged film” filter, but you can do much, much better than the cheesy iMovie effect. With just a few shapes, some filters, a couple generators and some behaviors, you have an old, newsreel-style effect that is very configurable. To make it longer, you just stretch out the length of the shapes/filters/behaviors, etc. It was fun and surprisingly quick to make. Give it a try and tell me what you think.

https://www.motionsmarts.com/downloads/agedfilm.html

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya Rod,

If parts of the UI are missing or being drawn incorrectly, you may have a munged or outdated version of ProKit (the UI library for Apple’s pro apps).

Try downloading and reinstalling it from here: https://www.apple.com/support/downloads/proapplicationsupport31macosx104.html

It can’t hurt, and might do the trick.

Good luck!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Tracy,

By “doesn’t work”, do you mean that the mask doesn’t seem to affect the image properly, or do you mean that it won’t let you successfully drag footage into the image-well?