This Reader Quicktip is all the way from Lu Nelson in Berlin. If you use Apple Motion a lot and integrate those Motion project files in your Final Cut Pro timeline then read on for what could be a nice realtime trick.
Here’s Lu’s tip:
If you place a Motion Template in the FCP timeline (accessed via the templates menu), it is colored purple like a generator. However if you right click on this and select “Show in Finder”, the drop that same file in to the timeline right from the Finder, you will notice it is colored like a media file, namely blue.
If you then play back both files, you’ll see that the “generator” version of the file plays back better. It supports Dynamic RT (i.e. higher frame rate / lowered resolution) while the other one will often cause playback to stutter. This seems to be because FCP since version 6 (or whenever they introduced the master templates thing) has a different playback architecture for .motn files when they are accessed as templates, but it doesn’t apply if you just drop those same files in the timeline from the finder or import them from motion.
So the tip is this: to get better preview-playback when you are creating Motion elements to combine with what you are doing in FCP, create some *empty* Motion projects at different frame/format sizes and lengths (e.g. 10sec, 20sec, 30sec whatever) and put them in the Master Templates directory. Then access them via the popup menu in the Viewer, drop them in your FCP sequence, right click on what you just placed and select “Open Copy in Editor…”.
It will now give you a Save dialog where you can save a copy of that “template” under a new name — and here’s the point: you can save it *anywhere* now (i.e. outside the Master Templates directory) and FCP will continue to treat it as if it were a template i.e. using Dynamic RT, because that’s how you originally brought it in. You can repeat this ad infinitum either with new empty templates or by copying and pasting the first one to a new position and doing “Open Copy…” again.
This is just a way to get better performance out of native .motn files in FCP, by having .motn files in your timeline embedded *as templates* even if they are not really templates at all.
That’s a good tip that could save some time. I’m definitely going to try that next time I’m working with a Motion project in FCP. Thanks to Lu for that tip. You can follow Lu on Twitter: @lunelson