[Scot Walker]

You are very welcome.

Once you get comfortable with behaviors, you will find them saving you huge amounts of time.

For example, I needed to animate a photo of some guy typing on a keyboard. All I had was a still photo. So I cut out the fingers with Photoshop and put each finger in layers; imported with layers into Motion; added an “Oscillator” behavior to the rotation of the first finger and adjusted (in real time as it played) the phase and magnitude until the finger looked like it was typing; copied and pasted that to each other finger and adjusting the phase of each so they weren’t in sync. It took me maybe 3 minutes to animate all fingers with behaviors.

Also, learn the Motion Path behavior and play with the options of it and then apply parameters to it…

Good luck.

[Scot Walker]

There are parameter behaviors that you use with Grow/Shrink to do various things. The point of using a behavior over a key frame is that a behavior is not fixed, so it allows you much more flexibility in moving things around without screwing up your fixed keyframe animation.

For example, Grow/Shrink is independent of the scale of the object. So feel free to change the scale of the object after you have animated it and the thing will still be animated as you set it up, except the overall scale of the object has changed throughout the animation.

It takes some getting used to.

[Scot Walker]

That’s it.

Thanks!

[Scot Walker]

Yeah, this really stinks right now.

OS X really needs an uninstaller. It has receipts, so I don’t know why they can’t use them with an uninstaller built into the OS.

Nobody knows how you uninstall Motion 2. There are threads you can search for to get the list of files you need to manually delete to uninstall Motion 1.

[Scot Walker]

I do everything I can in Motion 2.

If I need 3D camera or motion tracking or any other feature that Motion does not have, I’ll go to other motion graphics applications.

[Scot Walker]

Hey, I understand. When you are in the middle of a project and things start going wrong, you get angry! 🙂

This product is young. We all see excellence in the product, but it’s not perfect. I went through this with Adobe LiveMotion. It was AE for the Web and wonderful in so many ways, but it had bugs and was missing a couple of features that would have made it perfect. Hopefully, the future of Motion will not be the same as LiveMotion’s.

[Scot Walker]

Agreed. The 6800 Ultra isn’t an option anymore, is it?

[Scot Walker]

If you don’t need distance with the drop shadow on your text, use the Glow filter as a shadow. It doesn’t have the same issue the Drop Shadow does.

[Scot Walker]

I had a similar problem where Motion 2 would not launch, and I tried everything.

I ended up installing Tiger on another drive, a clean install. You have something loading when you boot Tiger that causes problems with Motion 2. The only way to get rid of it is to do a clean install, not an upgrade install. Wipe everything and install Tiger then install Motion 2, then launch Motion 2 and it should work.

OS X really does need a System Restore feature like Windows. Initially, OS X applications were suppose to be completely self-contained and not rely on anything outside of the bundle. That’s just not the case anymore.

[Scot Walker]

#1: I never noticed this. I created a project with a white background and I see what you are talking about. The text isn’t clipping the drop shadow. That’s a drag. Another workaround would be to do your text in Photoshop and clip the drop shadow. I’d call this a bug that needs fixing.

#2 This is only with the timeline, and I agree. CMND ARROW should move the object selected on the stage.

#3 How much memory will AE grab? Only 2 gigs. What happens when you fill that up? It swaps to the hard drive. At least Motion utilizes up to 8 gigs (minus System). Anyway, go to your Motion preferences and play with the Memory/Cache preference. Set it to 70% and I think you will have less HD swapping.

#4 I did exactly what you said and my key frames moved with my duplicated text. In any case, (#5) OPTION click on a key frame and they all get selected. I agree that we should be able to drag-select key frames with the cursor in the timeline.

I think you are getting frustrated because you are so familiar with AE and you are learning how to do things in a different way. There are obviously some things that need fixing in Motion (there are still things that need fixing in AE too, BTW). Motion is less than two years old.

You will get more help on this forum if you be less sarcastic. The whole AE versus Motion thing only creates flames. We could talk about what a pain it is to do basic things in AE that will make the drop shadow bug in Motion seem pretty minor, IMHO.