Doyle Rockwell
Forum Replies Created
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Howdy,
If you want your emitter to move along the path, just apply the Motion Path behavior to the emitter, set the Motion Path’s Path Type to ‘Geometry’ and drag-and-drop the shape into the image-well that appears in the Inspector or HUD.
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Howdy,
Something is probably forcing some of your elements to get comped in layer order, rather than depth order. This depends on the grouping of your elements, whether they have certain filters applied, blend modes, etc. If you can post the project file or a screenshot of your Layers List view, it’s likely that all will be revealed.
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Howdy,
A similar technique is described here: https://www.motionsmarts.com/tutorials/skywriting/skywriting1.html
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Howdy,
If you’re working on a 30fps project, I would hazard that there are 30 segments in that curve. What you’re likely running into isn’t a limitation of Motion, per se, but limitation of animation. Let’s assume a 30fps project. The behavior is set to move the emitter along the curve in 30 frames. The way Motion (or any application or even paper-and-pencil animator) does this is find 30 points along the path, one for each frame. On each frame, the emitter will be at one of those points. With a long enough curve or short enough span of time, those points will be spread out (spatially) and give only a jagged approximation of the curve.
If you were animating the position of a visible object, like some text or an image, persistence of vision would smooth out the movement in the viewer’s brain. But because you’re using an emitter to lay down a “track”, the approximated (chunky) path is shown.
As you’ve noticed, you can work around this by increasing the duration of the behavior or by shortening the path. Depending on the effect you’re going for, you might want to see if you can use the path as a paint stroke (i.e. change the shape’s type to Paint) and use the Write On behavior to animate its appearance/disappearance. Paint strokes can be stroked with images, so you could use the same source image as you are using with the emitter, possibly achieving the same result.
A final, kludgey—but maybe effective—route is to lengthen the behavior till the emitter comes out smooth, render it out by itself, reimport it as footage, and then retime it down to the desired length. This works, but it’s change-unfriendly, as you’d have to re-render the emitter for anything but a simple color-correction change.
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Howdy,
Most filters applied to 3D groups are done so in screenspace, so the border line created by Border will be around the full project area. When applied to a 2D group, it’s done in the group’s localspace, i.e. the bounds of the group.
As a little aside, if you need to create an outline around an element (or group of elements) that isn’t just based on object bounds, you can use the Outer Glow filter and just set both colors to the same value and narrow the Range. Outer Glow is based on alpha.
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Howdy,
To add yet another reply, keep in mind that groups are dynamic, by default. They size-to-fit their contents. If you want to enforce a specific size, use the Fixed Resolution option that Stephen described.
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Howdy,
Retiming functionality was added to Motion in version 3 (FCS 2), so the timing settings, like End Condition, have been moved to the Properties tab of each image layer. It’s muuuuuuuuuuch better.
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Howdy,
In a 2D matchmove, the camera doesn’t move (there is no “camera”, per se). Instead, you’re matchmoving an object to the onscreen position of a tracking feature. With a 3D track, the tracker extrapolates the movement of the camera used to shoot the footage, and you end up with a camera (in Motion) that follows that real-world camera movement. As I said, to do a 3D track you’ll need to use a third-party solver, like PFHoe or SynthEyes.
Can you describe, more clearly, what exactly you’re trying to do?
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Howdy,
Sure, just animate your shape (create your write-on effect), then use the Match Move behavior to do the tracking and matchmoving. Keep in mind, though, that Motion’s tracker is 2D, so if you need a 3D matchmove, you’ll need to use PFHoe or SynthEyes to do the tracking, both of which can export the 3D track to Motion.
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Howdy,
SLI has never been supported on the Mac, unless you count some of the 3Dfx Voodoo cards from the 90s, which had an SLI precursor. Someone at Apple told you you would be getting multi-GPU performance, with 7300s, no less?