Greg Niles
Forum Replies Created
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Motion has an equivalent, so the trick should still work. If you set the shape to “Stencil Alpha” blend mode and place it on top of the video you want masked, you get the same effect as FCP’s Travel Matte Alpha.
— Greg
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Another method is to add an image mask to each object you want to be masked and use the shape as the source. This way you don’t have to do any copy and paste, any changes you make to the original shape will automatically be made to the masks as well.
— Greg
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There is a button in the Motion File Browser at the bottom of the window to switch between displaying image sequences as collapsed or as individual files (it looks like rectangles stacked on top of each other). Turn this off and you can import a single file instead of a sequence.
— Greg
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I will venture a guess as to what happened – is it possible that you were located on the 1st frame of the project, and inadvertently hit the “o” key (this sets the out point of all selected items to the current time) and accidentally trimmed a whole bunch of elements to be only 1 frame long? I suspect this may be what happened because you said that the elements were “greyed out”, which Motion uses to indicate that an object is still in the project but not active at the current frame, and also you mentioned that the one you did find in the timeline was only 1 frame long. If you have a really, really long project duration, the timebars for your text objects may be extremely thin when you are zoomed out in time (perhaps as thin as 1 pixel if it’s extremely long).
I would suggest that you re-open the project and drill open all the layers in the timeline, then select the greyed out ones on the left-side of the timeline list and press “shift-i” to go to the in point of those elements. The time marker should jump forward in time, then you can drag the timeline zoom slider (the slider at the lower part of the timeline list) to zoom in and see your object and check its duration.
If the objects are still there, and I suspect that they are if they still appear in the Layers tab, you can simply drag the out points to put them back again, or place the time marker to where they should end and hit “o”.
I hope that steers you in the right direction. Let us know what you find.
— Greg