[Wayne]

Building a new simple project and stepping through it as I put together my last response was helpful. A reminder to slow down and step back when pulling one’s hair out.

Here is my recommendation – please anyone correct me if I do not have this right.

Define snapshots for slider widget tags first, then animate. If you modify any of the tags you break the animation. You can keep your key frames in place but you need to delete and rebuild the tags.

Something that Motion should handle and if I’m right it’s cost me a lot of valuable professional time. All of the resources from Apple getting sucked into iPads.

W.

[Wayne]

Thanks Simon,

From your response I see that I did not explain my issue well. Here is another shot at it and I think I see what might be going on. But any guidance you might have would still be appreciated.

Here is another shot at it.

– I defined a slider widget with three tags and on the order of five parameters assigned to it for a shape which will function as a button.

–  I set each of the tags to linear interpolation.

– I select each tag and set my parameters as desired (snap shots)

– I set my range for the tags to zero to two, one for each tag.
     * tag at zero, opacity of shape is zero.
     * tag at one – opacity 100% and outline of shape is medium grey.
     * tag at two – opacity 75% and outline gets a treatment of blue border and larger width.
               

– I then key frame the slider to move between the values of zero and two and I do not get the behaviors defined above for the color and width of the shape outline. I do notice that there is a gold capital R within a goldish square to the left of the opacity parameter in the inspector for the slider widget. It is not there for the parameters for the shape outline width and color.

What I notice as I step through frames is that the opacity parameter seems to be working but the color of a shape does not change. The first tag is still blue (highlighted) which is the color that the shape is staying at.

I think Motion is highly finicky, buggy and too idiosyncratic. I started a new project from scratch and made just one button. It worked. Then I modified the color at one of the. But this broke the animation. It’s like all of the tweened key frame around the tag were as before but just around the modified tag it behaved per the new modification. So the animation “jumped”.

I deleted the tags and started over leaving the keyframes in place. Now it works.

Crazy if I have to redo a hugely complex project. I’m hoping I’m missing something basic that someone can enlighten me to.

Thanks again in advance for any guidance offered.

Wayne

[Wayne]

Hi Noah,

Thanks for your quick response. I do not have any filters applied. this is as “vanilla” a clip as it gets, the one with the audio and the video.

Your suggested workaround is interesting. As I understand it I would just select my V2 contents which are the photographs I want to animate to motion and export the V1 and A1, A2 contents (the talking head) as a quicktime file. I would then import the talking head Quicktime into motion so I can synchronize my animation with the audio?

Would you just select the talking head clip, copy it into a new sequence, and then export as a quicktime movie? I did not quite understand “animation codec movie”. Assuming this is your guidance I’ll try it when I get home tonight.

Thanks again,

Wayne