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Dipping Your Toes into Motion

To add an animated background, check out the Content category in the Library. The Backgrounds folder contains a wide variety of animated backgrounds. Use the Preview window at the top of the Library to check out the animation, then drag one you like underneath your text in the Layers tab. If it doesn’t last for the full project, just drag out the bar in the miniTimeline to make it longer.

You may want to modify the look of the background. Go ahead and poke around in the contents of the background group - by using the 4th tab in the Inspector you can pretty quickly figure out how to modify the color and other properties of each element in the background.

To finish off things off, you may want to add a few design elements. Check out the Drawings category of the Library for some nice animated flourishes.

Using the Edit > Duplicate command (or by Option-dragging in the Canvas), you can quickly create copies, then scale, rotate, and position them as desired.

Once you are done, simply save your motion project file and then import the project file itself into Final Cut Pro to add it to your sequence. That’s right, no need to render out a movie; you can embed the .motn project file directly in Final Cut Pro. And if you want to make a change, it’s just a matter of right or control-clicking on the file and choosing Open in Editor.

Motion will launch (if it’s not already running), and after you make changes and save, the clip in your Final Cut sequence will automatically update. Nice.

So if you haven’t poked around in Motion, it’s time to jump in and check it out - you’ll be glad you did. Don’t worry if you don’t understand exactly what you are doing - that will come with time. Let me know what other nuggets you discover!

If you want to learn more about Motion, check out my training videos here.

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