[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

BTO graphics cards often get treated by Apple as a “part”, rather than a regular item, so they sometimes don’t appear on the Apple Store website. Try calling an Apple Store (retail) or a reseller that does repairs, and ask how much it would be for a Mac 7800GT, which they should be able to order from Apple. I saw the same deal with the 6800 Ultra card. Apple didn’t have it on the web site, but you could buy it in an Apple OEM “Graphics Upgrade” box.

Getting a 7800 into your system will make it fly. Good luck!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Ah, ah, ah…only so many free answers 😉 You’ll have to actually crack open the manual and look this up (in the Help menu). Try typing in ‘next keyframe’ and you’ll be pleasantly surprised. And the keyboard shortcuts for menu commands (such as what you’re asking) are right there in the menu with the command itself.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

Pressing Ctrl+K will set a keyframe for the last-adjusted parameter. i.e. If you move an object and then press Ctr+K, you will add a position keyframe. This was added in Motion 2.

Good luck!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

I think he’s talking about the way that AE pre-comps are treated as footage, so he can adjust a single text object and have it propagate across multiple instances. Unfortunately, Motion pre-comps aren’t treated the same way.

There is a dirty little workaround, though: the Basic 3D filter allows you to drop in any object as the backside image. So here you go:

1. Add your master text object
2. Draw a square shape object in the Canvas, bigger than the size of the desired text instance.
3. Turn off the Fill and Outline of the shape (making it completely transparent.
4. Apply the Basic 3D filter to the shape.
5. Drag-and-drop the master text into the Back Face image well in the Basic 3D filter.
6. Set the Y Rotation of the Basic 3D filter to 180 (so you’re looking at the back).

Now you can adjust the master text and the instance will update. The extra filtering that Basic 3D does will soften the text a little. Also, if your instanced text gets clipped (too big), you’ll need to increase the size of the shape object. Scaling it won’t do the trick, though, because transforms happen after filters, so the quality will be terrible. Instead, adjust the points of the shape to make it larger.

Hope this helps. Good luck with your project!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Bill,

You can certainly do what you’re asking. Behaviors usually modify the parameters they affect…not replace them. In your case, you’d start by setting the object’s Scale to what you want it to start at, say 90%. Then you apply the Grow/Shrink behavior and set the Increment popup to ‘Ramp to Final Value’. You’d then put in a negative percentage to start shrinking. So far, so good.

Now here comes the non-obvious part:

The Scale To amount in the behavior is a percentage of your *starting* value (the value before the behavior takes effect), NOT an absolute percentage. If you put in -25%, you might figure that it would mean 90% – 25% = 65%. But, again, it’s based on a percentage of the *starting* value (90%), so putting in -25% would have your object’s scale ending at 67.5%

To get the correct percentage, you do a little math:

65 / 90 = 0.72
1 – 0.72 = 0.28 = 28%

So, if you put -28% into the behavior’s Scale To, your object’s Scale will reach 65% at the end of the behavior (I rounded a little). You can trim the behavior to whatever length you want, to get the speed you’d like.

Apple should probably make this aspect of the behavior a little more straightforward, as you could just set a couple keyframes at 90% and 65% and move on with your life.

Hope this helps!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

I don’t think you’ll find Motion a great tool for use as a 2K playback system. Cineon isn’t supported, so you’d have to convert your frames to SGI, TIFF, etc. Also, Motion is compositing on the fly, so even with one sequence in the project you’re playing back a composite of an image sequence.

I would check out Iridas’ FrameCycler. It’s not super-pretty, but it’s a dedicated playback tool that supports a large number of formats.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

I know I’m going to get roasted for this, but I wouldn’t recommend spending the extra wad of cash on the Quadro. Quadros are a throwback to the old “workstation” market, where you used to be able to charge $2K-$5K for a graphics card. That was also back when Maya cost $50K. The GPU manufacturer adds a few more capabilities (generally fairly minor) to a card and calls it a “workstation-class” card. Which is another way of saying “Pay up!”

I have seen/used both a Quadro and a 7800GT and the performance difference was imperceptible. Again, this is in reference to Motion. If you were running Alias Studio, AutoCad or a similar 3D app, you might have the benefit of more hardware lights, etc. Motion is all about pixel shaders (game technology) and Quadros, historically, aren’t so hot on the games-oriented features.

Just my two pennies 🙂

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

Do you have Affect Objects enabled on any of those behaviors? If so, Convert To Keyframes won’t work. I’m not sure of all the reasons behind this, but since those behaviors could cause individual letters to move around and you can’t keyframe individual letters, it does make some sense. Hope this helps!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Imari,

Glad to hear your gin-and-tonic therapy method worked 🙂 It was pixelImage that was having the problem: I had responded, trying to help. Yeah, it looks as though Motion can only draw images in the Canvas on your primary display (the one with the menu bar). I would guess that the RAM preview worked because the images were cached in RAM, first, instead of coming straight from the GPU.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya Mark,

If your footage was imported as DVCPro, then it’s been pretty significantly compressed, which limits the quality of key you will be able to pull. Also, the Primatte RT keyer that comes with Motion is great, but it’s not designed for use with lossy footage. The Ultimatte plugin is a software-only AE filter (runs on the CPU, not using the graphics card), so it’ll be quite slow. I highly recommend checking out dvGarage’s dvMatte Blast keyer. It is specifically designed for use with compressed, DV-type formats. And, it has been written as a Motion-native filter, so it runs hot-diggity fast. And…it’s cheap. Check it out at https://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=dvmatteb They have a demo you can test out.

Good luck with your project!