Subtitles of the Movie

One of the nice things about Motion is how easy it is to customize the Workspace so not only the views you use and the arrangement of the windows, but also the toolbars so that you have those tools that you use most often closest to you and in a way that kind of fits your working style. So, that's what we're going to take a look at in this module and I'm sure this isn't the first time you've modified your Workspace before, so this is going to look very similar to what you may have seen in other types of applications where you modify the Toolbar, so it just kind of gets you pointed in the right direction for these kinds of techniques. As far as modifying the Toolbar, you can do a Control click or a right-click if you're using a mighty mouse, and you can manipulate this by choosing Icon Only, Text Only, or if you really want to get fancy, click on Customize Toolbar. That'll bring down a Toolbar Palette here and now you can drag and drop items either from your Toolbar or to your Toolbar. So a lot of these things are there by default, like adding behaviors, adding filters, make particles, and again, here's the default set here. So if you want the Keyframe Editor always at the ready then drag and drop it up into the Toolbar. If you want it off of there, click and drag it and poof, it vanishes. You can drag the default set as you can see here, and just kind of hit a Reset button on the whole thing. Now it would be difficult for me to do a lot of manipulation here because I'm kind of hamstrung by having to record at a resolution of 800 by 600. Again, you're not going to be using that resolution, and in that vein as I click on Done here, it's also relatively important to know how to change your Workspace. But again, I won't do much of it here because I'm kind of boxed in by my screen resolution. I want to try to give as much space when at all possible to the Canvas so that you can see what's going on as we build these projects. Now these tabs that you see both in the Inspector, the Library, and File Browser, all of these things are tear off tabs. So you can click and drag these and make a new little Pane with just that particular tab if you want to. So if you want to concentrate just on the Properties of the Layers in your project, which again, we will be dealing with the Inspector tab many, many times throughout the course of this tutorial, you can kind of tear it off and make it's own window out of it. Now, the way to undo this behavior, or this technique that I just showed you about tearing off the tabs, it's just to click the tab, drag it back over into what is referred to as the Utility Pane, but I'll hardly ever refer to it as the Utility Pane, I'll call it usually just go to your Browser, go to the Inspector, or go to the Library. Now, the other thing to remember is that as you start to work with items and you start to add them to projects Ð and let's just grab something real quick from your File Browser, from my File Browser Ð and we'll just grab a picture here and we'll just drag and drop it onto the Canvas. One of the things to remember is that you'll be manipulating your view quite a bit and one of the ways that you will do this is that sometimes you'll get out the Project Pane, which you can do with a Function F5, and so that's what the Project Pane is going to look like. You also might make zooms on the Canvas, you also might bring up your Timeline like this. So you'll rearrange the elements in your Canvas quite a bit. Now to return to the original view of the Canvas you do Window, Layout, and then Standard, which here's a command, keyboard shortcut you'll learn very quickly, and that is the Standard Layout, of Control U. So let's press Control U right now and this clears the space, clears the Project Pane and the Timeline as you can see, then it takes us back to the Standard View of a Utility Pane on the left and the Canvas on the right to have about one-third and two-thirds of the space respectively. Another keyboard shortcut you'll learn very quickly is a way to zoom this Canvas to fit, or to zoom your project to fit the available space in the Canvas, and that is Shift Z, which looks like that. And if it looks like this is off-kilter, it is, it's because I've put the picture a little bit off-center from the Canvas. Other views you have include, under the Window Menu here, you have other Layouts such as your Alternate Layout, which splits this Utility Pane into two. It takes this Inspector tab and it makes a kind of separate tab for it up here, so it splits things. There's your File Browser, there's your Library, and then you can really focus on the behaviors of the objects that you select here in your Canvas, or in your Project Pane. Again, to go back to your Standard Layout you can do Control U. Now, if you find a working style that you end up putting stuff on the right side and you've got enough space on your screen, and maybe you've got two monitors, and this may be a working style that best suits you, you can go to the Window Pane and go to Save Current Layout, and you can call this whatever you want to. VTC1 is the current Window Layout, so I'll click on Save here, and I'll use the options Control U to return to my Standard Layout, I will then go to the Window and choose Layouts, VTC1, to bring me back here. So, that's how you manage your Layouts, that's how you manage your Toolbars in Motion.