[Gareth Randall]

Don’t use keyframes, use motion tracking.

[Gareth Randall]

Hi Robert,

FWIW, trashing the preferences has NEVER solved any Motion problem I’ve ever had 🙂

Have you confirmed that it’s a general problem, and not a project-specific one? In other words, if you create a new project, does the same thing happen when you try and import a generator? Individual projects can become corrupted for some reason, meaning that strange things start happening. You can often get around this by creating a new project and pasting in all the layers from the corrupted one.

If it *is* a general problem, then your only real option is to reinstall Motion. Although Apple’s official line is that you have to reinstall the complete FCS suite, you don’t need to waste that much time. Just go and get the freeware FCS Remover, use it to completely uninstall *just* Motion, and then use the shareware app Pacifist to inspect the FCS install disc, locate the Motion installer package, and reinstall Motion on its own.

[Gareth Randall]

Motion doesn’t support using gobos with lights, so there’s no automagic way to do it.

There are a couple of alternative approaches you could try, though. One would be simply to use a feathered shape (say, a white rectangle) instead of an actual light, with its transfer mode and/or opacity adjusted appropriately.

The other would be to duplicate whatever it is you want to be affected by a custom-shaped light, put all the groups from that duplicate into into a single new uber-group, apply your light, and then add an image mask to the uber-group in whatever shape you want the light to be. Does that make sense?

[Gareth Randall]

Do you mean these titles here? They just look like fairly basic motion-tracked captions as far as I can see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0MiQIlUJ_c

[Gareth Randall]

You’re asking quite a lot there John, and there are various different ways you could tackle the problem.

For writing the text in cloud form, you might want to investigate using a replicator. You set the replicator shape to Image and then drag your text layer into the Source well. There’s a nice little tutorial that uses this technique to make the typed word PAIN look like it’s been written in blobs of blood – should be pretty straightforward to adapt it to making the words look cloudy:

https://www.motionsmarts.com/tutorials/pain/pain1.html

[Gareth Randall]

Very useful mini-tutorial Don, many thanks for that!

Is the Sequence Paint behaviour the only way you can extend a paint stroke into 3D space?

[Gareth Randall]

[Mike Petty] “is there a resource for vector maps I can use in Motion”

Just an idea, but have you tried typing “vector maps” into Google? 😉

I had to do a job involving maps a few months back, and fortunately there are MANY vector map resources out there, quite a few of them completely free, so you might not have to pay to download something from a commercial image site.

[Gareth Randall]

Just throwing this out there for discussion, but having seen Scott’s raw background plate, what’s the general opinion – if there is one – about the best way to do a screen replacement like that? Personally, I don’t think I’d use the green-screen approach, I would simply track the new screen over the top and then use an animated mask to put the hand back into the foreground. That way you don’t have to worry about keying out tracking markers because they’re automatically covered up by the new screen.

[Gareth Randall]

I asked a colleague who does a lot of high-end compositing on Smoke and Flame, and he says that it all depends on your shot. A common way of doing it is simply to paint the markers out, but as Motion doesn’t have any paint tools (in the sense of image touchup) that’s not much help.

Can you upload the video, or even just a still? That would help us suggest ways of getting round it with the Motion toolset. One approach you might want to consider would be to composite other parts of the front panel of the iPad over the top of the markers using garbage masks; with judicious feathering you may well get away with it.

[Gareth Randall]

You don’t slice the shot itself into parts. Noah is actually referring to the Offset Track function.

Briefly, Offset Track allows you to track a single shot in stages; you find your first track point(s) and track until they disappear and the tracker gives up. Then you step back to the last good tracking frame, click the Offset Track button and reposition the tracker(s) onto new points that are as far as possible in the same planes as the first ones, and restart the track.

You can see it in action in Stephen’s tutorial here.