Subtitles of the Movie

Alright, let's start our journey towards creating awesome motion graphics with our tool, Motion 3, and we'll start by simply launching the program. I've got a shortcut in the dock here and if you need help on how to do that you're probably taking the wrong course. You probably know how to launch an application from a Macintosh computer. Notice here, you'll probably not get this by the way, but I'm using a screen resolution of 800 by 600; that's just the resolution that I need to use to capture these videos, so you'll probably hear me make mention of that a couple of times throughout this tutorial. So, I'm going to click on Continue here and now we get the Welcome Screen that looks like this. The Welcome Screen, the first time you launch the application will display and you get four options here. You get to view Quick Tours, begin with an Online Tutorial, Start with a Template, or just Create a New Project. And if you want the Welcome Screen to go away, of course you uncheck that little checkbox right there at the bottom of this. So, we'll get started here with a new project and I'm going to click Continue, and now you get something that is fairly important. You get a dialog box here that prompts you for a Preset, and you can also set one of your Defaults as, one of your Presets as the Default. Now, these choices here we'll get into more detail as we continue throughout this tutorial, but you can see that there are an Array, and just a wide variety of Presets that you can use. For this one you probably want to select NTSC Broadcast SD, that's Standard Definition, and that is, if you're creating a project that you intend to be broadcast on television. Now again, your Presets can change but you kind of begin with the end in mind Ð what do you want your project, where do you want the final, finished project to display? And if the answer is on a television, Standard Definition television, then use this Preset. Now, you're not necessarily locked into these Presets, but this is a significant choice to make at the very beginning of your project. And again, if you're listening to this tutorial in the U.S. that's probably going to be your choice, maybe 60 to 80 percent of the time. So, that just means that the project that you create will use a 720 by 486 resolution and the duration of the project will be 10 seconds long, in other words 300 frames. So, I'm going to click on OK here, and now Motion opens up. Now you can see here that you have on the left a File Browser, which is pretty much the same thing as a Finder. You can search either network drives, your local hard drive, or any external drives, which I've got an external drive here. You can search through your pictures, music, movies so you get kind of a sub-set of using the Finder and that's a very handy thing to use. You can click on the Library, you can click on the Inspector as well, and we'll talk about all these things. So, the section that we've dealt with so far, drawn our attention to, is called the Utility Pane, and of course, as you just see, it has these three tabs. So again, this will usually be a starting point. We will import files from here sometimes or grab effects from our Library and apply them over here in the Canvas Pane. So, I'm going to click over here and make this the focus now. This is where we'll spend a lot of our time creating the actual project itself, so if we grab a Filter or a Particle Emitter for example, and you'll actually see this in the next module, but if we grab an effect from here you'll see it display, you'll see it kind of preview over here, you'll see your finished work here in the Canvas. There are two other panes that I want to mention here and they're kind of hinted at in the Canvas Pane. One of them is the Project Pane and the other is the Timing Pane. Now you might think that you can just drag them up and down and indeed you can, but there's another shortcut that will help you work with this things, work with these Panes, without having to use your mouse because it can be a little difficult to get your mouse right into the right spot and then click and drag. See what I mean? You can click and drag the wrong thing when you mean to pull out the Project Pane. So, I'll give you two keyboard shortcuts that you're going to learn now and probably like and probably memorize very quickly and that is the Function 5, or the F5 key, which will show you the Project Pane, and the F6 Pane, which will show you the Timing Pane. So, these are two things that we will use throughout the course of this tutorial, but for now we're going to put these things away by again, toggling them off if I press Function and then F6 it makes the Timing Pane go away and Function F5 makes the Project Pane go away. The thing to remember about this, of course, is that you have to hold down the Function Key on your keyboard to access those Function Keys, especially if you're using a laptop computer. If you just press F5, for example, you might end up turning up the volume on your computer and you don't want to do that. You want to use the Function Key and then press F5. Other keyboard shortcuts, in fact, almost all of the Function Keys that you see have some kind of behavior associated with them. So, I just want to point this out here. We'll explain this kind of on an as-needed basis. I don't want to just tell you about all the different Function Keys and they have you forget about it. I want to try to make it as relevant as possible when I point out some of these Function keys, but just know that if you press Function F1, or F1 it will take you right to the Inspector Pane of the Utility Tab. If you do F2 it'll take you to the Behaviors of the Inspector Tab. So, F1, the Properties of the Inspector Tab; F2, the Behaviors of the Inspector Tab; F3, Filters of the Inspector Tab; and, F4 the Object, or the Context Tab of the Inspector Tab in the Utility Pane. Now we're at F5, F6, we've seen those before: F5 and F6 get out and put away the Project and Timing Panes respectively, and then another one that is very handy is F8. That will let you focus on just the results in your Canvas Pane only and puts everything else away. So, F8, again, toggles that off, and now you have a better idea of the items that are in the Motion Workspace. In the next module we will start to get things out from our File Browser in our Library and start to create a Motion Project.