From the course: Motion 5.3 Essential Training

The interface

- [Instructor] The first time you launch Motion, you'll get this window here, which is the project browser. This is organized in multiple sections, basically you work from left to right. If I go to the All section here, this gives me recent files, it gives me different templates, all kinds of stuff. Honestly, 99 times out of 100, you're going to be starting here in the Blank section with a blank motion project. Once you have this selected, you can go over here on the right and choose whatever resolution and video you'd like to be working at. So if I wanted to work at HD, I could choose that. If I wanted to work at 4K-Ultra HD, I could choose that. You get the general idea. The majority of the time in this course, I'm going to be working in this Broadcast HD 720 at 29.97, and the projects will be either five seconds or 10 seconds in time code. Now when you click open, the first time you open Motion, you'll have an interface that looks like this. Now, let me break down these windows with nothing in the project first. On the left side, I've got the library panel and the inspector panel. You can just toggle back and forth between these two by clicking on the names, or clicking the buttons up here. The library has a bunch of different presets for things that we can build our projects with. For example, Particle Emitters, if I click on something down here, it'll give me a preview up here. Now don't worry if you don't know what Particle Emitters are, we're going to get to that. Now, the next section over here, this is my layers panel, and this is called the project pane. Each of these tabs are contained within the project pane. And to have a better understanding as to what this looks like, I'm going to open up a project that is not a project file, okay? So I just want you to watch, I didn't include this on purpose, because I just want you to watch. So, please just watch. So here in the layers panel, the topmost layer is always going to be your project settings. If I select that, and go to the inspector, in here, I have different tabs underneath the inspector. And the properties section is where I could change the width or the height of my project, the overall duration, if I want to view things in frames or in time code, there are a number of different options you can scroll up and down. Now, once you've actually imported things into your project, you'll have layers and groups of layers. So, for example, in this background layer here, if I open this triangle, I can see all the things that I've used to create this background. So if I click on this top one here, I get an icon that shows me this is a video file and it's called Panels. So notice when I click on this, in the inspector I have properties that I can adjust like position, rotation, scale. Notice the triangles are repeated in here as well. So any time you see a triangle, you can open it and close it. Now these other sections will have information when you have those things applied. For example down here in the green area, if I select that image, I have this thing here, which if I click on it is a filter. Filters allow you to change the appearance of whatever it is that you're looking at. So this one has a hue adjustment on it. Now, if I click back on my panels video here, notice I have an Image section. This will dynamically update dependent upon whatever it is you have selected. Now, the video files and the graphic files here all have the same kind of info, but notice when I click on the group, I get different options here. Now, the Media tab is where everything that you've imported into your project is stored. Motion references video files, and layered Photoshop documents, and Illustrator files. Tt does not embed them in your project. That's why I have my exercise files organized the way they do. I suggest whenever you're working on a Motion project, to have an overarching folder that contains not only your Motion project, but any other files that you might be importing into that project, that way you can always find where everything is. Now, once everything has been added into the layers here, they'll pop up here on the right side in the canvas. So in the canvas here, I've got a view of what my project will look like. Now, in the middle section here, these are my transport controls, so I can press the play button and play my footage. Notice when I played this, I heard some audio. If you look on the left-hand side here, I have a speaker where I can turn audio on and off. This little button controls whether it loops or not. We'll get into all of the different buttons, okay? But it's important to understand you can start and stop playback with this button here. This is where the time is. This is where the playhead is. Notice as I drag this little thing back and forth in this area called the timeline, up here in my canvas, I also have a representation of the playhead, this is called the mini timeline. Last but not least, in the upper right-hand corner of the interface, I have these pulldowns. These pulldowns allow me to control the magnification of our canvas. So for example, this is set to fit, meaning it'll be as wide as it needs to be and it will adjust based on the size of the interface. This pulldown here, which says render, this allows me to lower the resolution of the scene so Motion can continue playing back in real time. You can also turn things on and off, like lighting, shadows, reflections, etc. Okay, last thing, keyboard shortcuts. You can press F5 to hide the project pane. You can press F6 to hide the timeline. And it's a toggle, every time you press it, it will show and hide those elements. Nine times out of 10, when I'm working in Motion, you'll see me with both of these open, but that's just so you guys can see everything that's going on in the interface. Anything that's in the layers here will also appear in the timeline. The difference being the timeline shows how long that object is in existence, where the layers is a method to organize things vertically like stacking pieces of paper on a desk. The absolute last thing to understand is right up here at the top. This is the toolbar, these are buttons that we will be accessing as we move throughout the course. So don't panic, we'll cover each of these buttons as we get things rolling.

Contents