Subtitles of the Movie

Alright, let's take a look at some of the Preferences we looked at in the previous module and put them in practice in this module here. So, we'll go up to Motion again, the Motion Menu, and investigate our Preferences. And again, we're back at the project and we're going to see what effect the Still Images and Layers has. Also, we want to look at the Canvas and just at the Alignment Guide, Color, and Spacing, and so that also we're going to take a look at here as we use the Alignment Guides. Now, first of all let's just find something that's on our hard drive, and for me it's in the Pictures Folder, I've got this collection of baseball pictures. Again, I'm going to use these later on in the tutorial and you'll see how I'm going to use them here in just a bit. And now I'm going to put this on the Canvas and I want to make it front and center just by dragging it right onto the Canvas. Now I'm not able to do that really. I just, I can approximate at it, but you can see that I'm having a little difficulty and that's because I need to use my Guides and those guides that I just showed you on the Canvas Category of your Preferences. So you should see some yellow guides come up to help you center and align objects to the edges of things and even line up objects with one another on the Canvas. We'll make sure and use this View Option drop-down and one, show your Overlay so you can toggle this on and off with the Command and/, and then make sure your Dynamic Guides are enabled. So, I've got a checkbox by this and so I should be able to see these things. What's wrong with my Dynamic Guides? Why don't I see these yellow lines across the screen to help me line up this picture? Well, the answer to that is under the View Menu, and something that should be turned On by default but which is easy to turn off is the Snap ability. And so this keyboard shortcut is in and so therefore it's very easy to toggle it on and off because it's also right by the Spacebar as you're playing through stuff, and again I've learned this through hard experience here, but you play stuff and then you stop and you accidentally hit the N key, so you don't really know if Snapping's on or off. Well, to help avoid confusion and pulling your hair out on your part you can save hair that I've lost, is that you can make sure that Snapping is indeed on, that your Dynamic Guides are on and now you can position the picture in the middle, front, and center just like that. Now, the other thing that I really spent some time with as we were looking at our Preferences is what happens with Still Images and Layers? The Layers are created at the Current Frame, and what happens to Large Stills Ð they're scaled to the Canvas size right now. Let's see that in action when we use a photograph on a smaller canvas. So, for this I'm going to start out a new project. Now, File, New, and then instead of NTS CDV, which would create something at 720 by 480, let's go instead to just iPod Video and then click on OK, 320 by 240 resolution. So now we have a smaller Canvas here and if you want to investigate the project Properties remember that you can always go to the Edit Menu and click on Project Properties and then look at your width and height and your preset if it has been used. Most typically you will use Presets instead of creating Customs. We talk about that later on as well. So, let's take this same picture and let's move it onto the Canvas, and we'll try to make it front and center, and notice that it still fits in the Canvas. Why is that? Because it has been scaled, it has been shrunk. It's not at full resolution any more. Well, is that what you want? It may be, it may not be. Let me undo that behavior, change my Preference and see what it would mean if I change this to doing nothing. So, do nothing would be here and then now I'll use the picture like that. That allows me to have all the resolution that's native in the picture. Now if I want to scale it down I certainly have the ability to do that and we'll learn certainly by the end of this tutorial how to scale objects that you put into your Motion projects, but for now you can see what a dramatic difference it makes between those two options in your Motion Preferences.