Luke Jones
Forum Replies Created
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Yes, you could easily build an effect, or series of them in Motion that could do all of the things you asked. Basically, what you would do is create a new Final Cut Effect in Motion, select the Effect Source layer and clone that two times (or as many times as you need for your slices. For each clone layer you would scale it up apply a mask and define the shape, then enable the Drop Shadow options on the clone layer and adjust those. If you need the mask move/scale independent of the video, you could move each clone layer into a group and mask the group.
Once you have the basic composition, you could set up and publish rigs or just publish the required parameters for adjustment in FCPX. Then just drag the custom effect on your clip and adjust things to taste. Motion is great for creating reusable effects like this.
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You will actually want to use Move>Direction>To for both instances of the behavior. If I have a default camera and a shape at the origin, and I want to dolly in on Z and then back out, I’d add the behavior and trim to the length I need, then set the Z position (-1300). When I’m ready to dolly back to the original start position, add the second Move behavior and set the Z position to Zero.
Think about it this way, you are literally setting values where to start or end from. If I apply the behavior and set the X value to 100, then set the Direction to “To” and duplicate the behavior, my camera will not move to X 200, it will be at X 100 because the value is not additive.
As a final tip, it may be helpful to also show the keyframe editor with the behavior selected, this will show you the animation path created by the behavior so you can make sure things are doing what you need.
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Depending on what you need, you could also achieve this without keyframes or behaviors.
Option 1: Make the images a sequence. Create an 8 frame project with the two layers and set the length of each layer. From the Share menu, export them to an Image Sequence. Import your image sequence, go to the properties>timing and set the end behavior to loop. Now just extend the length of the new layer. If you need to adjust the timing, you could use the speed parameter to slow playback down, or speed it up.
Option 2: Clone a group. Put the two images in a group and set the length of each layer. Clone the group (k). Like the previous option, use the end behavior in the properties to set the end condition for the clone to loop. Extend the length of the clone layer.
Both options will flatten the images (no z depth difference in the clone), but if they just need to flicker on and off will work. The second option has more flexibility because you can still animate each source layer if needed or be more flexible with the timing.
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Like Robin said, not all parameters are “behaviorable”. As an alternative, try the Strobe filter.
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I just looked at your project and it looks like the group named Group 3 is rasterized and this is probably causing the shadows to disappear. If you make the group 2D (there’s no reason for it to be 3D as far as I can tell) the shadows will appear again.
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A few other things to try when you are not seeing updates in the App store.
1. Quit the App Store and then delete Motion from your system (drag to the trash and empty). When you relaunch, go to your purchases and it should have the “Install” button available. This will grab the latest version of the application. *Note: If you need to keep an older version, compress it and move it someplace outside of the Applications folder for storage.
2. Make sure you don’t have a copy of Motion on another mounted drive/partition. If you do compress it or unmount the drive before checking for the update with the App Store.
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Would this work for you? Select the pdf in the media tab and turn off “fixed resolution”. Then for the replicator, change it to 3D.
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Try Bump Map with Horizontal and Vertical Scale.
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Sounds like you are hitting a point of rasterization:
https://help.apple.com/motion/mac/5.0/en/motion/usermanual/#chapter=A%26section=6
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Hey Stephen. Send to Motion (4) worked for me when I already had Motion 4 running in the background.