[Greg Niles]

Actually, that’s a slide. I think he’s asking to move the clip in time while keeping the in/out points the same, right? Hold down option while clicking and dragging on a clip in the timeline, the cursor will change to the same “roll” icon that FCP uses.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

Add a white color solid on top of the 2 photos that quickly fades in and fades out at the transition cut point. It’s easy to do:

1) Add a color solid generator to your project, change the color to white.
2) In the timeline or mini-timeline, shorten the timebar color solid to about 10 frames, position it in time so that it overlaps the end of the 1st photo and the beginning of the 2nd photo.
3) Add a Fade In/Fade Out behavior to the color solid.
4) Change the Fade In time in the dashboard to about 3 frames, change the Fade Out time to about 6 frames.
5) Position the time cursor on the cut point between the 2 photos and drag the color solid in time until the pure white frame is exactly at the cut point.

There are other methods that involve using a combination of a brightness filter and keyframes, which would give you a more blown-out photo effect, but this is a good method that is fast to set up.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

Not sure what happened to your project, but I’d suggest creating a new empty project with the same dimensions, frame rate, and duration, then using the file browser to drag & drop your original project into the new one.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

“Is there a way to collapse multiple layers and reveal them (not in the composition, but in timeline and layers windows) all at once?”

Holding down option while clicking the collapse/uncollapse arrow will expand all the sublevels of a layer. If you want to do this to multiple selected layers at once, select the ones you want first using the normal method (shift, command), then hold down option and use the right arrow to expand. This will open up all sub-layers in a layer.

“How about something akin to the U key in AE, which reveals all (and only) attributes with keyframes?”

The Keyframe Editor does this by default. If you choose the “Animated” curve set from the popup at the top of the Keyframe Editor (which is picked by default), any object or layer you click on will automatically display only parameters with keyframes and filter out all others. From there, you can use the checkboxes to turn on/off individual parameters at will to further filter out specific parameters. This also works with multiple objects, for example if you shift-click on several objects that are keyframed, the keyframe editor will show only keyframed parameters for all of the selected items, so you can compare several objects at once.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

You have to export using a QuickTime codec that supports alpha channels. Some of the presets in both Motion and Compressor that are set to QT codecs such as DV NTSC do not support alpha channels because those codecs can’t support transparency.

To find out if a QuickTime codec supports alpha, look for an option for “Millions+” under Depth in the QuickTime settings dialog – if this is available then that codec supports an alpha channel. The most frequently-used QuickTime codec that supports alpha is the Animation codec, which is also used by the “Lossless” preset in the Motion export dialog. If you choose this preset you will get an alpha channel as long as your background is transparent in the Motion project itself.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

“Thanks. Its under the Project prefs at the bottom: Limit playback speed to project frame rate. Its disabled by default.”

This switch is actually enabled by default, precisely because of the potential for the problem you ran into. I’m not sure how it got unchecked on your system, but it’s not the default setting, I can assure you.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

You could try convert to keyframes, then drag the resulting position keyframes in the canvas towards action safe.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

Yes, this is very straightforward. You can replace objects with different source media by dragging and dropping from the File Browser onto the object in the Layers list or Timeline.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

Use the animation menu to the right of each parameter in the inspector, there’s an Add Keyframe option there.

— Greg

[Greg Niles]

This one is pretty easy. Draw a rectangle mask on your video clip, then open the inspector for the mask. There’s a feather slider in there.

— Greg