Do you still need a reason to use Motion?
This week on MacBreak Studio, Steve Martin from Ripple Training picks up from the prior week's discussion about using the Placeholder generator in Final Cut Pro X to pre-visualize a shoot by building a storyboard. If you didn't catch last week's episode, you can do so here.
While the Placeholder generator is extremely useful, it does have limitations. Although you can choose the number of people in a scene, the gender of those people, and the framing of the people, you can't change the relationship of the people to each other in the frame. In other words, you can't move and scale the subjects independently of each other. Which is exactly what you would need to do if you wanted to create a different camera angle, such as an over-the-shoulder shot.
Once again, it's Motion to the rescue. Besides being a fully self-contained motion graphics and visual effects application, Motion is also the source of almost all of the titles, transitions, effects and generators built into Final Cut Pro X. So you can think of Motion additionally as a sort of “development environment” for creating or enhancing the content in Final Cut Pro X.
It's the “enhancing” part of Motion Steve walks us through today, as he demonstrates how easy it is to open a copy of the Placeholder generator in Motion, locate the appropriate groups and layers using the handy thumbnails in the Layers list, locate the desired parameters in the Properties Inspector (position and scale) and then publish those parameters so that they are available to the Final Cut Pro editor.
In a matter of a few keystrokes, he is able to rather dramatically increase the functionality of the Placeholder generator, making it easy to move and scale individual characters in a storyboard to communicate alternate camera angles. Watch the video to see how you can do this yourself.