[Doyle Rockwell]

P.S. And don’t forget, you can make the gradient generator into any size you want and set the gradient points in any direction you want. You can even mask the generator to customize its shape before you use it as the source for the image mask.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Howdy,

All you need is a gradient generator and an image mask. A smooth (and highly configurable) black-to-white gradient provides a smooth fall-off source for an image mask on your lower third. Here’s some steps (used with text, but your situation is the same):

https://proapptips.com/tips/article.php?story=20050331161922674

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Rene,

The movies are encoded using H.264, which means you need Quicktime 7 to view them. The upside is, the movie files are only around 16Kb each. I have trouble getting JPGs that small 🙂

[Doyle Rockwell]

Heya,

If you’re working with already-existing projects, like those from Damian Allen’s book, there is a bug which can cause the audio to have playback problems. There’s a delightfully easy workaround here: https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301198

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Damon,

Animation is essentially lossless, so it’s typically used as the “high-quality” format.

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Rene,

Motion 2 has the new replicator tool which, amongst the seemingly endless things it’s capable of, allows you to do a variety of write-on effects. You’d use the replicator to draw the fill and use the original image as an Image Mask to properly mask off the fill, giving it that “reveal” look. The rest of Jayse’s technique, regarding the scaling of the petals, etc, would work the same as in AE.

For the replicator write-on bit, here’s a tutorial that can get you started:

https://homepage.mac.com/specialcase/tutorials/repline/repline1.html

The bottom movie on the second page shows the kind of smoother write-on look that you’d want to use as the fill for Jayse’s tutorial.

Good luck!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Pol,

You can use the replicator tool in Motion 2 to do some nice drawing stuff. Since you might not have access to the version 2 manual, you can check out some of the recent replicator tutorials that have been published. They might give you an idea if it’s what you’re looking for.

https://homepage.mac.com/specialcase/tutorials/repline/repline1.html (check out the bottom of page 2)

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/sequence_replicator_spencer.html

Hope this helps!

[Doyle Rockwell]

Not be too contradictory, but I think you’ll find that the Nvidia 6800GT performs better than the X800 (for the same price), and it also supports 4K resolution and accelerated 16-bit rendering. Also, the 9800 with 256MB doesn’t seem to run noticeably better than the 128MB version.

Clockspeed, pipelines, etc. have a lot of impact, not just total VRAM. For example, a classic rip-off in the PC universe is where a third-party will take a crappy card and tack a whole bunch of memory on it to try to pass it off as a powerful one, like a 5200 with 256MB RAM. Silly, eh?

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Bee,

Seven layers of particles is nothing to sneeze at. That’s a rather large simulation, and when you’re several hundred frames into it and make changes, the simulation has to recalculate the affected particles again from the beginning, which can make it laggy. That’s just how simulations work.

Is the lifespan of the particles optimized? Are they living for a long, unnecessary time after leaving the frame? That can result in a huge particle layer being rendered, even though only a small part of it is visible. Toss on some filters and you’ve got Motion rendering multiple high-res objects, which will slow things down even more (especially with a so-so card). Try to optimize your project a bit, and remember that several particle simulations isn’t trivial.

With great power comes great responsibility, etc 😉

[Doyle Rockwell]

Hey Scot,

It looks like Motion file-locks the footage files it’s using. As far as I can tell, you have to quit Motion for the file to be released.