Results tagged “motion” from Final Cut Studio, Avid, Adobe, and Video Streaming

For some reason, we seem to get a lot of people coming to the site looking to draw a heart beat.  I haven't the foggiest idea why, but I'm glad – it's one of those examples where Motion can make your life a lot easier.

This is what we're setting out to make today; you can dress it up however you'd like, and you can even use a shape that looks more like a "real" heartbeat than the one I drew.  We'll do a couple of approaches -- one is quick, the other is better-looking.

As you may have noticed, Apple has retired LiveType as of Final Cut Studio 3.  Fortunately for you LiveType folks, though, you can get to almost all of LiveType's functionality in Motion (plus a lot more).

Background

Our students really seem to like LiveType's LiveFonts -- sets of animated glyphs with which you could type as if they were a regular font.  In my grouchy opinion, the stock LiveFonts quickly grew stale as they began to appear all over the place, but even I have to acknowledge that there are some really nice third-party LiveFonts available, and many of my students have chosen to invest in those.

Motion can indeed use all of your LiveFonts, although it might not be immediately obvious.  If you're new from LiveType, you should first realize that the Inspector in Motion works very similarly to the Inspector in LiveType -- and all of the LiveFonts functionality is controlled there.  Motion's Library also contains thumbnail previews of all of the LiveFonts you have installed.

Read on for the Step by Step ...

Motion's motion trackers are relatively sophisticated, as 2D trackers go.  In the general case, motion trackers can useful to give you a head start on basic compositing tasks like corner-pinning, to extrapolate simple camera motion to guide match-moves, and to extract elements of natural camera motion (see also the Stabilize Behavior).  And in Motion's case, its trackers are not only quite good at what they do, they're easy to use quickly.

In Part I, we used a fairly simple system of particles to throw footballs across the screen. In that process, we explored the basic controls that Motion offers over its point-based particle emitters: emission angle, range, particle speed and angle, and so forth.

This time, we'll work up an effect something like a primitive snow flurry. That will let us go over shape-based emitters, evolve particles over their lifetimes, and touch on physics simulations.

Some of you like my technical side notes ("wonkish" was the word you used, as I recall), so here's a crash course in the statistics that let particle systems look good.  If you'd rather just focus on learning the "how" rather than the "why," you may want to give this article a miss -- the gentler Part 2 of this series is in the pipeline (it's already written, actually).

So as a side note to Part 1, we'll be using the same process by which we set the speed of the footballs (setting an average value and a measure of random variation) to accomplish a lot with particle systems (at least in Motion).  You can control an awful lot about a given parameter just by setting two values: the average value of a parameter, and the amount of random variation you want in that parameter. 

It might help if you have dealt with basic statistics: remember the "bell curve" of the normal (or Gaussian) distribution?  It's called "normal" for a reason: an incredible range of natural phenomena fit the distribution.  That's why it's useful when we're trying to fake natural phenomena.

Particle systems are everywhere, and if you've dealt with motion graphics you've probably bumped into the concept before.  Today we'll try to flesh out the concept from the ground up.  While my practical exercise is laid out for Motion, the principles are universal.

I'll start by saying that particle systems are worth learning.  Know them, and you'll build more stunning graphics faster.  In all sorts of organic settings -- from smoke and flame effects, to snow and rain, to fields of grass -- particle systems, used artfully, allow for coherent and visually stimulating effects with far less effort and precision than frame-by-frame animation would require.  Particle systems animate "automatically" over time, but you still have tremendous control over how the systems behave at any given time.  Plus, you have complete control over each individual wisp of smoke or blade of grass: used effectively, this allows for systems with extremely clean alpha channels as well as allowing quick, basic 3D animation.

Particle-based animation is a type of procedural animation -- instead of describing the specific transformations that you want to happen to a specific element, you describe what a typical example of the "right" behavior and give the computer the freedom to pick the specifics.  For example, I could say "take this picture of a football, and 'throw' it across the screen from left to right."  But what if I wanted to throw a whole bunch of footballs at once? 

Last week, a former student called with a question. He was trying to have a line draw on screen, from the top down. He did this by keyframing the scale and position of the line he wanted, but he found that his line kept wanting to scale from the top and bottom instead of just from top down.

There are two solutions to his problem, and both are important enough that I wanted to share them with all of our readers interested in Motion.  First, he could use the shape's anchor point to fix his problem with scaling. But there's also a completely separate approach to this problem, that might be more useful.

Final Cut Studio brings a new level of simplicity and flexibility to the post-production process, and Motion is no exception. Seasoned special effects guys may want the extra horsepower of heavier-duty software like After Effects, Shake, or Combustion -- but Motion is sophisticated enough for most people's needs, and it comes with an especially artist-oriented interface. Once you understand it properly, Behavior-based animation is one of those big boons for the creative process.

When you're working with Motion, you'll often be using alpha channels (that is, transparency).  For example, if you want a lower third to animate onto screen, you'll need for Final Cut to know which parts of the lower third are "see-through."

By default, Motion is set up to handle such a workflow: the black background that you see in your Canvas actually renders transparent. If you need a true colored background -- or if you just want to work on a background color other than black -- you'll need to adjust your background settings in Project Settings (Cmd+J).

Update:  Several of you have written to suggest that I do the videos for this series.  Thanks for your input -- I'm working on the videos and project files, and I'll post them at the top of the related blog entries as soon as they're ready!

In the previous part of the 3D in Motion series, we discussed the very basics of manipulating Motion layers in 3D space.  We moved them and rotated them, and now it's time to go one step deeper.  Our goal in this lesson is to understand how to "fly around" in 3D scenes, using cameras and 3D layers.

Background and Concepts

To get the concepts down, let's step back a little bit.  As you were moving objects around in 3D space in Part 1, it might have occurred to you that the X, Y, and Z arrows are a little bit pointless (or at least awkward, when you're trying to get things where you want on the screen).  I mean, think about this situation: I've rotated my layer in 3D to where it takes the perspective I like, and it's in the top-right corner of my canvas, where I want it.  But I just want it to be a little bit ... bigger.  I could use the object's 3D Transform Arrows to move the object closer to me in 3D space -- but why not just use the Scale controls to "zoom it up"?

If you're not accustomed to working in 3D space, you might find Motion's 3D features intimidating.  You shouldn't.  Motion's 3D capabilities strike a great compromise between simplicity and power -- and just a glance at some of Motion's pre-built 3D templates will convince you of the power.

The Very Basics

The first step in understanding Motion's 3D space is to rewind to high school geometry: what are those three dimensions?  Remember that flat surfaces (like graphs, or TV screeens) have a horizontal "X" axis and a vertical "Y" axis -- and that an "axis" just means that an object can move in that direction without changing its position in the other direction.  So if I were to take, say, a piece of text, and make it scroll from the bottom of the screen to the top, I'd be moving only along the Y-axis of the screen: it's in the same place horizontally.

If you the viewer are looking directly at the screen, then that third dimension -- the "Z" axis -- just describes objects on the screen moving closer or farther from you.  In and of itself, this doesn't mean much: if an object is moving only along the Z-axis, it's staying in the same position vertically and horizontally.  Essentially, you'd just see it appearing bigger as it comes closer towards you or smaller as it goes farther away.

3D space begins to become cooler when you realize that, once you've pulled objects off the flat space of the screen, you can start spinning them around and treating them like objects in the real world.  The most basic example of this is the age old "3D Spin" transition: picking up a layer and rotating it where it "flips" towards you or away from you.  In the practical exercise for today, we'll see that you can use Motion's rotation controls to do this easily.

Read on for the practical ...

Motion 2 introduced support for pen-based Gestures -- meaning that folks with a graphics tablet and pen can perform a wide variety of actions without setting down their pen and switching to a mouse or keyboard.

For a quick overview, have a look at the cheat sheet (PDF) that Apple publishes.

Now, to be fair, most of the gestures have keyboard equivalents, and all of them appear in menus and other places around the interface.  But if you're manipulating objects with the pen, you'll probably enjoy being able to, say, delete or reorder the object you're "holding" just as naturally as you position and resize it.