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Filed under: Editing •Motion Graphics •Post Production •

Editing in Motion Part 1

Trimming

If you need to trim a clip after adding it to the Canvas, you simply drag either end of the bar in the mini-Timeline. Or, move the playhead to the point you want the new In point or Out point, and press I or O, respectively.  Note that trimming an In-point doesn’t perform a ripple edit, so after trimming, you’ll need to drag the clip to the left. If you hold down the Shift key while dragging, the clip will snap to other clips it encounters, the playhead, or the beginning of the project. To see the relationship of the clip you are dragging to other clips in the Timeline, press F6 to open the Timing pane and check out the Timeline tab while you drag the clip.

Using these keyboard shortcuts, you can quickly edit together a series of clips to form the building blocks for your motion graphics project.

You may now be wondering: what about ripple edits? Roll edits? Slips and slides? Or split edits? What about playing around the edit point as you trim?  While you can perform some of operations in Motion, if you need access to the full complement of trimming tools you should first do your edit in Final Cut Pro. Then, use the Send to Motion Project command to bring your fine-tuned edit into Motion for the rest of your work. But for more straight-forward editing tasks, Motion works quite well. And, it can handle some more specialized editing tasks as well.

The Sequential Edit

Here’s an example where a little preparation can make for a very fast edit.

If your media is already trimmed to the correct length and all you want to do is edit the clips into the timeline one after the other, Motion has a great way to do just that, all in one shot. For example, let’s say you have a series of 6 video clips, each exactly 5 seconds long, for a 30 second spot.

The first thing to do is to name or number your clips sequentially at the start of each clip name - for example, 01_Car_wide.mov, 02_Car_cu.mov. You can use numbers or letters; the key is that they sort by name in the order you want to see them in the timeline.

Motion will allow you to edit all of your clips into your project at once. The key is to select them all in the File Browser, then drag them to mini-Timeline - but don’t let go just yet, or the clips will be added with a composite edit (all stacked on top of each other). Rather, wait a beat for the drop menu, which gives you the option to choose Sequential.

This option will add your clips one after the other, just as if you had dragged them from the Browser to the Canvas Edit Overlay in Final Cut Pro. You can see the clips lined up in the mini-Timeline and in the full Timeline (press F6 to open the Timing pane and select the Timeline tab if it’s not already forward).

This method works great for a series of images as well as for video. If you are working with still images, go to Motion’s Preferences (under the Motion menu), and in the Project section, change the Default Layer Duration to Custom and enter the number of frames or seconds you want to see each still.

Notice that we were able to do this edit directly in the mini-Timeline - we only used the full Timeline to check it out the result. But the full Timeline opens up several other editing possibilities - which we’ll explore in depth in Part 2. So stay tuned!

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Ug, I’m sorrry but I can’t think of anything less appealing than trying to edit a spot in Motion (and I’m a huge Motion fan). Maybe editing a piece in Livetype…  yea, that’d be worse….

Nice food for thought though.

Posted by Easy Street  on  02/24  at  04:44 AM

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