https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92aOBwsbqW8&list=TLdY6TFwRF4DQzMDAzMjAxNg

This week on MacBreak Studio, special guest Mike Matzdorff (@FCPXFeatures) shows us a very fun and interesting workflow he uses to speed up animation development.

Mike has figured out how to leverage a plugin for Final Cut Pro X called mBehaviors from MotionVFX.com to bring an animatic to life, greatly cutting down the amount of work needed to communicate early-stage animation ideas.

Mike first created a layered sketch on his iPad in an app called Procreate that outputs layers .PSD files. By the way, it also captures the drawing process and makes a movie of it, which is pretty cool. Anyway, Final Cut Pro X plays very nicely with PSDs, allowing you to bring them in with each layer as a separate connected clip inside a compound clip.

Mike then trims these layers to bring in different elements at different points in time to match a VO or story arc. He creates some animation by setting keyframes for opacity, position, scale, and rotation in the Inspector. The rest of the animation he accomplishes using mBehaviors, which are title effects, applied as connected clips over the clip you want to animate.

The trick is to add them inside of compound clips so that they do not affect other clips beneath them. Doing so allows you to create a wide variety of animations without setting any keyframes at all, since these title effects are actually Motion projects that have already been animated with either keyframes or behaviors. Just drop them over a clip, trim, adjust published parameters in the Title Inspector if needed, and that’s it. With this process, you can build up layers of an animated scene, and importantly, very quickly make changes to individual layers without needed to create an entire new scene.

If you would like to learn how you can use Motion to quickly create professional titles, transitions, and effects, check out our brand new Warp Speed Motion tutorial, designed specifically for Final Cut Pro X editors who don’t have the time to learn all the ins and outs of a motion graphics application.