[Gareth Randall]

One way of doing it would be to apply the path to each of the objects, and then adjust the Path Offset parameter of each object to get them arranged in the starting positions that you want. Then simply animate the offsets to make them travel along the path.

If you had Motion 4 you could probably use the Link behaviour to make the movement of one object drive the movement of all the others.

Another way would be to get one object following the path, and then simply duplicate it and stagger the duplicates along the timeline. That would work particularly well if you wanted the objects to pop onto the screen one at a time rather than all be visible from the start of the animation.

[Gareth Randall]

Hi Austin,

At its simplest, Stencil Alpha works like this:

Just two layers, with the upper (text) layer set to “Stencil Alpha”.

This is the result:

It works just the same if you put the text layer and the image layer in separate groups.

Also, remember that the stencil acts on *every* group/layer that is beneath it. That’s the main difference between a stencil and a mask; a mask will only act on the specific layer or group it is applied to, so if you want a mask to affect every layer/group in your project, you need to put all those layers/groups into one uber-group and then apply the mask to that. Whereas if you use a stencil, it just needs to be the topmost layer in the project, and it will affect every single layer/group beneath it.

[Gareth Randall]

Currently, you’re only viewing the alpha channels of the objects you’re adding to the canvas. Try changing the view mode box from “Alpha” to “Color”. (It’s the one underneath the “File Browser” button near the top right of the screen).

[Gareth Randall]

[Andy Neil] “I’d have to say that they are no where near alike in the way they affect the image.”

I’d have to disagree 🙂 Video noise can look just like a layer of grain jumping all over the image.

[Gareth Randall]

“Video doesn’t have grain. Film does”

Video can have noise though, which might as well be grain in terms of the way it affects the image.

[Gareth Randall]

You are probably asking any motion tracker/stabiliser to do too much with the footage you have if it’s very shaky. If the shakiness has caused any natural motion blur or image distortion in the original footage, then no stabiliser is going to be able to repair that automatically.

You’ll have to look on it as a multi-stage process; get the basic stabilisation done as best you can and use that as your background plate, then fix the specific parts of the image that are still causing problems and composite them onto the background. That’s the way a professional VFX house would approach it.

For example, you might have to step through the original shaky footage until you find a suitable frame with the tyres looking good, then mask them out and key them onto the full length of your stabilised background plate over the top of the “breathing” tyres. Am I making sense?

[Gareth Randall]

If you’ve reinstalled it from the original disks and it’s not working, I think you’ve already got the answer to your question.

You can try forcing an update just to see if there’s a compatibility fix that your Mac hasn’t picked up yet, but a quick Google reveals that other people have been unable to run Motion 2 under Snow Leopard since the Prokit 5.1 update, and since it’s such an old version, Apple may not have bothered to do anything about it.

[Gareth Randall]

I use a first-gen MacBook Pro 2.16 (so Core Duo rather than Core 2 Duo) with 2Gb RAM for Motion 4, and it doesn’t feel significantly slower than Motion 3. What really slows it down is motion blur.

[Gareth Randall]

Or the N key to toggle snapping on or off.

[Gareth Randall]

Hi Sam,

This is very quick and easy to do in Motion using Simulation behaviours – no keyframing involved at all.

Click here to see the demo movie

This took two minutes to make (literally). I drew the circle, positioned it at the bottom of the screen, then added Gravity and Edge Collision behaviours (both from the Simulations section of the behaviours list) and a Throw behaviour (from the Basic Motion behaviours).

Your layers list should look like this…

…and my parameters for the behaviours were as follows (adjust them all to taste):

Cheers!