Subtitles of the Movie

Alright, welcome to Chapter 3. In this Chapter the goal is to get you just a little bit more comfortable with Motion and we'll show you some tips and tricks here for getting the most out of your Workspace, to customize some of the Workspace, and we also talk about ways to optimize Playback, and in this one we take a general stop in the Preferences dialog box, or the Preferences Palette, and we look at some of the preferences that are worthwhile of mention. So, every application on a Macintosh computer has a set of preferences, no different with Motion, and some of these preferences you'll come and they'll have a big impact on how you use the product, some of them not so much terribly. It will kind of depend on what you're doing. So, I'm not going to go over each and every option in each and every category of your Preferences, but I'll just, again, point out a couple of noteworthy ones. In the General Tab what happens at startup? You're going to create a new project or is it going to open the last project? That can save you 10, 15, 30 seconds each time you open up the program here. Where is your Library Path going to be? That can also be set, and can be set, this can sometimes take up a lot of space so you sometimes might want to put your Library on an external or a network storage device somewhere. From your Appearance, here's where you can change your Heads-Up Display Window opacity and that will certainly affect how you deal with the Heads-Up Display and how much it gets in the way of your other work. Generally a bigger screen is helpful rather than tweaking a whole lot with your Heads-Up Display. Your Heads-Up Display, incidentally, can be brought up with Function F7, and so you can change aspects of whatever is selected with the Heads-Up Display. So this is something that we're going to use over and over again throughout this tutorial, but that's what the Heads-Up Display looks like and, now I'm going to go back to Preferences and if you like the, if you want to tweak the Window Opacity then you can do so with your Heads-Up Display. Other things that might have a big impact or relatively big impact, your Frame Rate is going to be displayed if this is checked on your Status Bar. Your Status Bar is right up here to the left. There's no, there's nothing here that you would see that, like that's the Status Bar, but that is the Status Bar, this area right here. And you'll see a Frame Rate any time you play back a project, so if I play this back in the Canvas you'll notice here that the Frame Rate is displayed up here. Now, if you want other information up there, if I go back to my Preferences, such as the Color and the Coordinates of your mouse you can do so and when you close this you should see, again, the coordinates of where your mouse is as you move it around the Canvas. I generally don't end up needing that so I, again, usually turn that off. The other one that's probably of most direct impact and probably the one more than any other is this Project Category of your Preferences. This is where you define things like the Default Project Duration, so if you open up a new blank project it's going to last 10 seconds by default. Now if you commonly work on Motion projects for commercial spots or little bumps, you might want to tweak that to maybe 3 seconds, you know, you just want text whooshing across the screen, some picture whooshing and twirling in 3D Space and you don't need projects that last any more than 3 seconds or maybe they're 30 seconds, you're working on broadcast commercials and most of your projects are going to be 30 seconds in length. Now, other items from this page that can have quite a big influence on your day-to-day operation are these, your Still Images and Layers. Whether or not that when you add them to a project they will use the Project Duration so will every still you enter or you add to your Motion project, will it be 30 seconds long, that still, or will it use a custom duration of maybe, if you're cutting between, just you know, two seconds, or 10 frames. Maybe that's a more realistic way to look at your Still Images when you're working with a project. You're not going to dwell on a Still Image for more than just about a third of a second or maybe a little more than a second, maybe 60 frames, two seconds, up to you. But again that can have kind of a big impact on how much you need to edit and tweak and change the duration of a given layer. Others include this: Create Layers At either the Current Frame or the Start of the Project. A lot of times you might want them at the start of the project, especially shorter projects and then it's easy to kind of manipulate where they live in the Timeline. As you're playing through and you decide to add a Layer it adds it at the Playhead and maybe you want that behavior to effect the entire project and now you need to, again, either remember to go back to the beginning of your project or move that layer manually. Again, it can kind of effect how you work with the program day to day. And you'll see me do this throughout the tutorial as well where I put something in and then I need to move it or I need to go back to Frame 1 of the project to add a layer. Lastly, in this Still Images and Layers take note of the Large Stills. And what you'll see here in this Large Stills section is that you'll have three choices. You can either do nothing with your imported image, which will bring it in at full resolution. Now, a lot of times what happens is that your image is a lot bigger than the canvas that you're working with, especially if you bring in, say, a high-resolution Photoshop file. The other thing you can do is that you can scale it to Canvas size or down-res it to the Canvas size, and these are both very similar choices. One of these will keep the resolution the same so it's the equivalent if you're using the Transform Tool, which you'll see throughout this tutorial, but you hold down the Shift key while using the Transform Tool to change the scale of a picture, the other you can actually change the resolution and make it fit the Canvas size, so again, these are fairly close cousins, and my recommendation is that you just make a couple of selections and import pictures using each to see which best suits your needs. So, that's a little introduction to the settings that are available with Motion. Those will serve you well as you continue you work.