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Filed under: Motion Graphics •

Animating Text in Apple’s Motion

Creating Text in Motion

In Motion, you create text directly in the Canvas with the Text tool, pressing Esc (or Enter) when you’re done. A bounding box will surround your title.

Just as in After Effects, there are two modes: editing mode and layer mode. When the cursor is visible, you’re in editing mode; when you press Esc, you’re in layer mode (where any changes you make to the formatting apply to the entire layer). When the selection tool is active, you can double-click the text layer to re-enter editing mode. Note that the shortcut for kerning is Control plus the left and right arrow keys (not the Option or Alt key you might be used to).

Motion’s HUD (Heads Up Display) gives access to the most common text formating properties such as font, size, tracking, and alignment.

Once you have some text to play with, select Inspector tab then the Text tab. The Text inspector has three panes to explore: Format, Style, and Layout.

The Format Pane

The Format pane in Motion. You can keyframe most of these properties by setting keyframes, although more interesting animations will be achieved using “behaviors.”

The Format tab includes standard parameters such as font, size, tracking, baseline, slant, scale, offset, and rotation. Note that Rotation offers separate X, Y and Z dials, and applies per character (not per layer).

More unusual features include a Monospace checkbox (useful when you need all characters to be the same width), and an All Caps checkbox, which converts lowercase characters to capital letters. The All Caps Size slider sets the size of the converted characters; at 100%, they will equal the size of a capital letter, but at a lower value you can create “small caps.” The Text Editor area lets you to edit the text directly; handy when it’s being animated in a crazy fashion.

If you’ve installed Apple’s LiveType application (it comes bundled with Final Cut Pro), it comes with a bunch of LiveFonts that Motion can also take advantage. LiveFonts are fonts where the characters are small movies; so they self-animate, write themselves on, and so on. A few are quite usable, and more are available from third parties.

The Layout Pane

The Layout pane in Motion. Worth noting is the Type On section, which can either be keyframed to type on characters or can be automatically animated with the Type On behavior (more on both options in a bit).

The Layout tab covers more of the paragraph-type setting, such as alignment, justification, and line spacing. The Layout Method popup can be set to Type, Paragraph, or Path modes (refer to the Help > Motion User Manual for more on type-on-a-path).

The Flatten checkbox comes into play when text is moving in 3D space. Enable it to force characters to remain on their 2D plane. The Face Camera checkbox is also a 3D feature: enable it to forece characters to always face the camera. (We’ll look at animating text in 3D in a future article.)

The Type On section can be used to quickly type on text by keyframing Start (more on that later). The margin parameters at the bottom of the Layout panel are only for paragraph text (which I won’t be covering here since it’s rarely used in video work).

The Style Pane

The Style pane in Motion. Text consists of four main groups - Face, Outline, Glow, and Shadow - each of which can be enabled or disabled separately. Note also the Style Preset popup menu at the top.

Move onto the Style tab to find the biggest difference with After Effects. In Motion, a text layer consists of four distinct “sub-layers”: Face, Outline, Glow, and Shadow. You can toggle each one on or off depending on what you need, and each has its own set of controls.

The Face (or “fill”) can be filled with a solid color, a gradient, or a texture (an image). You can choose from a useful bunch of gradient presets which you can modify and save as another preset. Select Gradient, then twirl down the Gradient section to reveal the full-featured Gradient editor. What’s cool is that the gradient is applied to each character individually, so it behaves as you would expect when the characters are moved, rotated, scaled and so on.

If you edit any of the the preset gradients, you can save your new gradient by clicking on the Gradient popup (circled, left). Because the gradient is applied per character, it will animate in a natural way (above).

You can also fill the text with a texture (just add the texture image or movie as a layer, then drag it to the texture > image area). Check the user guide if this is your cup of tea.

Finally, each of the four sections (Face, Outline, Glow and Shadow), each have their own Opacity and Blur controls, so I’ll just mention that once.

The Outline parameters in Motion’s Style pane.

The Outline (or “stroke”) section has similar features to Face, including fill with gradient or texture. Additional parameters include Width and a popup for whether the stroke draws under or over the Face.

Aesthetically, I prefer the quality of the stroke in After Effects, particularly as you now have control in CS4 for how the corners are joined (set Line Join to either Miter, Round, or Bevel from the Character panel’s Options menu). In Motion, most of the corners appear miter but some appear clipped or beveled (see figure). It would be nice to see the outline options for Shape layers (Joint > Square, Round, and Bevel) migrate over to text outlines.

In Motion, the outline can appear slightly clipped at some of the corners or edges (above). In After Effects CS4, you can set the stroke to Miter, Round, or Bevel (below).

A bevel alpha effect would be a nice addition to Motion titling; I couldn’t figure out how to do this even with a filter. In After Effects you can choose Bevel Alpha effect or the Bevel & Emboss layer style. While the bevel is applied to the layer as a whole, you can get away with it if the characters don’t touch each other; plus, during the animation you can use motion blur to disguise it.

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One important thing to note is that anything you do in Motion can be saved as a Template. Then, you can access that file within Final Cut Pro as a Master Template from the Generator menu. You can change the text, size and tracking, preview it and include it in a sequence without any rendering. Obviously, this simplifies many workflows.

Thanks for the thorough write-up.

Posted by funwithstuff  on  07/08  at  10:50 PM

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Thank you very much for this very interesting article.

I just bought FCS few days ago, and I am learning it…

Could you please tell me how you did the wate drop in the first video of your article (“I’m falling down”) ?

Did you use a video footage ? Is it an animation generated by a 3D software ? Is it a Motion application feature/stuff ?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/13  at  05:36 PM

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Hi Tanaka,

The background for the “falling down” opening animation consists of three layers.

1. Particles by Motion: I started with the Embryo particle generator, and rotated it to be vertical. I also changed the gradient color to Atlantic Blue in the Inspector > Emitter > Color Mode section. I probably tweaked other stuff too.

2. Another layer of Particles by Motion, this one based on the Shell particle emitter. I reduced the Spin amount and increased the Speed.

I did this a long time ago, so can’t be sure excactly how I tweaked the particles! But remember that the presets are just starting points, and they are easily edited.

3. The water footage is the background is Clip UW103 from the Ultra Water collection from Artbeats. This is a single water drop that ripples outward.

hope that helps, and glad you found it the article useful. - Trish

Posted by Crish  on  08/14  at  10:58 AM

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Forgot to post the link to the Ultra Water clip, so you can see it solo

http://www.artbeats.com/clips/8048/12141

Posted by Crish  on  08/14  at  10:59 AM

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Animating emitters problem,

When I try to put a simple motion path or a match move on the “clockwork” emitter, a stock emitter in the Library I believe, I can’t get it to move the actual emitter! It just applies the motion to the control handle. It there something I’m missing? Sorry if this is a bit off subject, but I can’t find an answer elsewhere

Thanks,
Eli

Posted by grinline.com  on  06/05  at  01:25 PM

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Eli, just clone the emitter, turn off the original, and put your motion path behavior on the clone.

Posted by Mark Spencer  on  06/07  at  11:15 AM

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