Importing PSDs and vector files - Motion Tutorial

- We're actually going to start this project straight from a new, blank project. So the first time you open Motion, you'll see things that look like this. I just want to go to my preset and make sure I'm using the broadcast HD 720 preset, and under the frame rate, I'll choose 29.97. Then I'll go ahead and click Open, and we'll have a blank project. Now, I know a lot of you probably come from design backgrounds and might actually be somewhat familiar with Photoshop and/or Illustrator, and those types of graphics can be imported into Motion. The thing to understand is Motion natively will support a layered Photoshop document and a flattened Illustrator file. When you import the Illustrator file natively into Motion, it will be flattened, but it will maintain its vector nature with some adjustments, so, the first thing I want to do is go ahead and import a layered Photoshop document. So here, let's go to the upper left quadrant of our interface and click on the handy dandy Import button. Now I want you to navigate to wherever your exercise files are saved. Mine are on the desktop. Go to the Media folder, and we'll start with the 02_Psds folder. I want you to click once on the KinetEco_Layered.psd file, and then click Import. Now when it pops up, I get options. I can have it actually import an individual layer, or, if I click on the pull-down, I can choose all layers. So, let's choose all layers, and when I click okay, notice they're all going to be imported into our project. If I scroll up and down here, you can see all of those different layers are imported. And here, under the magnification, I'll just make that fit, so you can see what we're dealing with. Now, if you notice, the graphic element here has been brought in, and then it has each individual layer underneath that, and everything is under its own group. So what I want to do is kind of group each of the different layers into their own groups here inside of Motion. So to do that, what I'll do is I'll go ahead and click on this top circle, this yellow circle, and here, I'll make the layers a little larger, so we can see what's going on. And then I'll hold down Shift and I'll click on the teal circle, okay? And I can go ahead and control+click or right-click, and when you do that, I can choose Group, and when I do that, they'll automatically be added into a group here, so I'll go ahead and double-click on that Group name, and we'll call this Circles, and then I can click on this group and drag it up out of all the other layers, and you want to drag it 'til it gets up here, towards the left, and you get that plus button, so when I let go, now my circles are on the top of the hierarchy in their own group. I could do the same thing with the text and my background gradient elements here. I just want you to note. Notice when I click on the word Gradient, I can go to the Inspector panel, and in here, if I go to the Properties, notice it's respected the settings that I had inside of Photoshop. The opacity inside of Photoshop is 58.82, and that's how this gradient is set up. So, you've seen how you can import a layered Photoshop document, how it respects things like the opacity of the layers, how to group those individual layers, etc. But, let's look at what happens if I click on this text layer, like this Kinet text layer. It's not really text. It's a graphic. And if I go ahead and try and scale this up, notice when I scale it up to 400%, it looks jagged. This is a bitmapped file, which means it's only as large as it was originally drawn, and if you try and scale it up, it's going to break down. So I'll just command+Z to undo that, and I'm going to go ahead and turn off the visibility for my Kinet, Eco, and Inc. layers, okay? Now, let's go ahead. I'm going to click on this group layer here, and I'll go ahead and click Import. This time we'll navigate in our exercise files to the Media folder in the 03_Ai folder, and I want you to go ahead and just choose the Kinetico_Wht or white Illustrator file here, and when I click Import, it's automatically going to import that element in here, and notice it's on its own individual layer, so here, if I move this layer down like so, you can see it's all brought in, and everything seems fine. If I go to the Properties section of the Inspector with that layer still selected, and I go crank up the scale, it, too, is going to break down. Well, let's look at how we can fix this. If we go to the Media section, we can click on the .pdf file right here, okay? This is the second file that we imported. It brings in Illustrator files as .pdfs. Now, with that selected, I can go to the Media tab and in here, there's a setting for fixed resolution. If I deselect that, now, notice, my text layer is nice and sharp. If I go back to my Layers panel, I can select my Kinetico_Wht layer, and it will retain its vector nature. It doesn't do that by default, but if you enable it, it will go ahead and maintain its vector nature. So, inside of Motion, natively, you can import layered Photoshop documents, and you can import vector Illustrator files. You just need to make sure to go into the Media tab with that file selected and disable the fixed resolution setting. That way, it will maintain its vector nature.