ProVideo Coalition.com: Final Cut Pro and Motion by Mark Spencer

Last week I wrote about some of the great new features in Motion 5: a sleek new user interface, deep integration with Final Cut Pro X, the ability to publish your own “Smart Templates” along with parameters you specify, a powerful new Rigging feature, and an unbelievable low price. There’s also a fantastic new Keyer and a few other goodies that I’ll be discussing in future articles.

Motion’s attractive new interface

However, as folks are beginning to discover, Apple also removed some features in Motion 5 - features that many editors and motion graphics designers relied on as an integral part of their workflow.

If you are brand new to Motion, you probably won’t notice anything missing. But if you’ve been using Motion 4 together with Final Cut Studio 7 and you are expecting everything to work the same - well, some things just won’t. Specifically, here are what I consider the top five missing features in Motion 5 - and what the workarounds are.

1) Send To Motion Project and Round-tripping

By far the most glaring omission is the loss of the “Send to Motion Project” command that we could use to send one more more clips from Final Cut Pro 7 to Motion 4 in order to add motion graphics and visual effects. The Send To command not only automatically created a Motion project with the correct project settings that contained the selected clip(s), but also optionally embedded that Motion project into the Final Cut sequence so that any changes you might need to make could be accomplished by using the “Open in Editor” command: just change and save the Motion project, and it would automatically update in the Final Cut Pro timeline.

The Send to command in Final Cut Pro 7.

Now, it’s true that in certain cases, sending clips from Final Cut Pro to Motion are no longer necessary. For example, you no longer to need to send clips to Motion in order to take advantage of Motion’s Optical Flow retiming algorithm - Optical Flow is now built directly into Final Cut Pro X.

Selecting Optical Flow from the Retime menu in Final Cut Pro X.

Another reason for sending clips to Motion in Final Cut Pro 7 was to have a reference image for designing titles, such as lower thirds. But in Final Cut Pro X, you can do a great deal of design work directly within the application thanks to the Effects, Transitions, Titles, and Generators Browsers - they contain a ton of highly customizable presets. So you can design “in context” right inside of Final Cut Pro X.

But there are definitely times when you want to create your own title, transition, or effect from scratch - and it’s helpful to be able to send the clips you want to use to Motion in order to do that. And, if you want to track a shot in order to add an image to scene, you have to do that in Motion - there’s no way to do it in Final Cut Pro X.

Workaround: for these situations, what you’ll need to do is the following: in Motion’s File Browser, navigate to the Final Cut Event that contains the clip(s) you want to use, import them into your Motion project, and trim as needed. After you are done designing, you can either render out a movie, or you can publish your Motion project as a Generator - it will then be available in Final Cut Pro’s Generator Browser, where you can drag it to your timeline to replace your clip(s). Neither of these solutions are elegant - but that’s why they’re called workarounds.

By the way, if you’ve installed FCP X and Motion 5 on the same partition as Final Cut 7 and Motion 4, when you choose Send to Motion from FCP 7, by default Motion 5 will launch - and the resulting project will not embed into the FCP 7 sequence. However, if you first launch Motion 4, so that it is running when you use the Send to command in FCP 7, the selected clip(s) get sent to Motion 4 and work as expected. See this support article from Apple for more information.

2) Video Output

Just as with Final Cut Pro X, there is no way to output your Motion 5 project to a professional calibrated monitor to check for broadcast-related issues such as interlace flicker, title and action safe, and color space issues. You could do this easily in Motion 4.

Video Output in Motion 4 - not currently available in Motion 5.

For me this is not a critical issue, since over the past few years my work has moved to almost 100% web delivery. But if you deliver for broadcast, especially in standard definition, the loss of this feature is painful.

Workaround: use the Safe Zones in the Canvas, use projects that are not interlaced as much as possible, and render and test your final output using Final Cut 7 to see it on a calibrated monitor.

3) Opening Multiple Project Files

In Motion 4, you could open as many project as you wanted: you could work on multiple projects at the same time, refer to other projects while designing, and copy layers and groups from one project to another. In Motion 5, you are restricted to opening just one project at a time: as soon as you double-click another project, choose File > Open, or choose File > New, the current project closes (Motion of course prompts you to save if necessary).

In Motion 4, you could have several projects open at the same time.

Furthermore, you can no longer import entire Motion projects into another Motion project - a great workflow for building more complex motion graphics out of components.

Workaround: you can still save layers and groups by dragging them to the File Browser. You can close the project, open a new project, and drag those layers or groups into the new project. Not as easy as dragging between two open projects, but it works.

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I’ve been depending on Motion for at least 3 years now. I’ve been using it for the graphics of all my projects and always wanted the ability to modify parameters of my templates inside final cut pro.
Now Motion 5’s rigging lets me do that but Final Cut Pro X media management / file structure logic goes against the logic of a project that would need to use a motion template.
The good thing about a motion template was that you could use it on all sequences and with one change in motion all your sequences’ graphics based on the template would change.
I know there is a workaround to the lack of sequences by just treating projects a sequences and events as projects but that surely might turn into a nightmare in an elaborate complex project. Let alone communicating and collaborating with others.
Just Imagine the nightmares Editor to director conversation: “The sequence, no I mean the event, no i mean the projects…. you know the thing where you drop clips into…”
Anyway, Instead of spending time in learning Final Cu Pro X and all its nuances and workarounds, I’ll spend that time learning After effects and Premiere to perfection.
If I’m too slow while learning AE , at least there are tons of great AE templates available to buy and save me some time.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 07/02 at 07:56 PM

i have also triend motion. i liked it. it is pretty much beautiful.

regards,

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 07/02 at 08:50 PM

An update - here’s an Apple KB article confirming that Finder previews of your Motion 4 projects will break when Motion 5 is installed:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3819

Posted by Mark Spencer on 07/05 at 03:05 PM

Great tip about renaming motion projects to .mov for an AE import. Didn’t know that one. Is that simply an alternative to rendering out of Motion? Curious when you would use that.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/14 at 10:59 AM

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