[Greg Niles]

If you’re using Photoshop CS2, make sure you save with the maximize compatibility option turned on (this is in Photoshop’s File Handling preferences). This will ensure that .psd files have the composite layer saved with it, which Motion needs to read in a file with transparency.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

Motion has a cool trick to compressing groups of keyframes in time – if you hold Option while dragging the last keyframe in the timeline (no need to select them all), it will compress or expand all keyframes in time as you drag left or right.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

There are three 1080i50 project presets in Motion 2.0 – for DVCPROHD, HDV, and regular HD.

But, you can very easily create your own setups in Motion via preferences. Go to the Presets icon and choose “Project Presets” from the Show popup button. From there, you can duplicate one of the existing ones and change it however you like, or create one from scratch.

You can also do this right from the New Project dialog by choosing “Custom…” from the menu.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

Go into preferences, click on the Appearance icon. Change the Timebar Display popup to “Filmstrip”. Now, if you zoom into the timeline, you should see a thumbnail for all frames in your image sequence.

[Greg Niles]

A RAM preview will only render up to the point where it runs out of available RAM, that’s why Motion automatically stops when you try to preview your entire project in RAM. However, with a 20 minute project, it’s impossible to RAM preview something that long anyway. Let’s say you are using a standard NTSC D1 project – each 720 x 486 frame requires roughly 1.4MB of memory (width x height x 4 image channels). 20 minutes is 36,000 frames, which would require 50,400 MB, which means you’d have to have 50 gigs of RAM in your computer to preview your project.

As for the audio, it is calculated at the end of the export and added as a track into the QuickTime move. If the export is interrupted midway you will not get the audio calculated. If you need to export a smaller region with audio, set the global playback in and out points to less than the full duration, then check the “Use Play Range” option in the export panel.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

In Motion the Colors window it works exactly like the system color picker. Single click opens the palette and also selects the color well for editing. If you want to pick a different color well while the Colors palette is still open, just click on it (it should highlight darker). Clicking on a color well “de-selects” it so it no longer responds to the Colors palette.

The reason why the double-click isn’t working is because when you double-click, you’re basically clicking once to get Colors window, then clicking again immediately after to de-select the color well, which breaks the link between the window and the color well that needs to accept the changes.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

Usually this is done by opening the Dashboard and dragging the movie or image clip you want from the Layers tab into the “Back Face” image well. You can do the same from the Inspector, too.

There’s also an even quicker shortcut – drag the movie or image clip directly onto the Basic 3D filter in the Layers or Timeline window. This sets the source of the 1st image well it encounters. This trick works with filters, behaviors, and image masks – basically anything that requires a second source.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

You could use images with blend modes, or you could draw masks, either would work. For the mask method, draw a rectangular mask over the entire image, set the mask blend mode to “subtract”. Adjust the opacity of the mask so the image is partially transparent. Then select the parent image and draw another smaller rectangular mask over the area you want to highlight. You should see that area at full opacity while the rest is dimmed.

What’s good about this method is that you can animate the opacity of the 1st mask to make the highlight region fade in.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

You can get this effect using the “Vignette” filter in Motion 2.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

I just watched the tutorial, yes everything in there can be done with Motion, but of course it wouldn’t be the exact same steps since Motion has quite a different workflow.

You can do a “stroke” in Motion by drawing a bezier path using the drawing tools, then use the replicator with a small round shape to animate a stroke using that path (using the Replicator Sequence behavior). Then use the resulting animated stroke as an image mask for the original Photoshop layer you want to grow. A Motion user who posts here, specialcase, has written some great tutorials on how to create write-on effects using the replicator:

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

— Greg