New features in Motion?

That's right – they aren't earth-shattering, but there were a few new features added to the Motion 5.1.1 update that came out the same time as the Final Cut Pro 10.1.2 update a few weeks ago.

In truth, there has been a lot of work going on “under the hood” in Motion over the past several years, since Final Cut Pro X depends on it for all the titles, transitions, effects and generators that are built into it. And, both applications use the same underlying rendering engine. But there haven't been the kind of significant feature updates that we've seen in Final Cut Pro X on a regular basis – 12 updates now over the past three years (several of which were bug fix updates). Then again, Motion didn't lose features when it moved from version 4 to version 5 the way Final Cut did from 7 to X.

In this episode of MacBreak Studio, I show Steve Martin from Ripple Training two new features. The first is an enhancement to the Contrast filter. New parameters have been added: you can now smooth out a high-contrast effect to help with banding and posterization, and you can limit the contrast adjustment to only affect the luminance or brightness values of an image, leaving hue and saturation unaffected. This second parameter I really like as it can create a bleach-bypass type of effect.

The second feature is a new set of parameters for the Sequence Text behavior. As you may know from earlier MacBreak episodes, this behavior is one of my favorite in Motion because you can use it to create a huge variety of text animations. Now, there is a new Select category that allows you to restrict an animation that you've created to a specific range of characters, words, or lines. It's a great addition to an already excellent tool. Check out the video for all the details.