Call me old-school. Traditional. A post production fuddy-duddy.
Or, just too busy editing to notice.
I made the switch from a decade of editing with the Media100 platform to Final Cut in the Fall of 2007. Like most Media 100 editors, I haven’t looked back, and consumed every bit of FCP knowledge I could get my hands on to ramp up as quickly as possible. In the mad rush to get up to speed on a new (to me) editing platform and jump right into pending projects, I neglected some details that perhaps a new editor with more time on his or her hands would have uncovered: Apple Motion templates were one of them.
Most editors do any sort of heavy effect work outside of their main editing software, and After Effects has always been my go-to app for effects/compositing. I had heard of Apple’s Motion, of course, but I had not taken the time to learn what I thought was an After Effects clone.
While it does do a lot of things similar to After Effects, Motion also has its own strengths (and weaknesses!). The feature that really gets me excited, though, is its ability to interface with Final Cut through the use of Motion Templates. Having been editing blindly through deadlines since I began with FCP, it has taken me a few years to stumble upon this miracle time saver.
Once a Motion Template is created within Motion (or purchased from online stock media-type sites), it can be used within Final Cut as a “drop zone” for video clips in your FCP project. Operating just like the drop zones in DVD Studio Pro’s menu templates, these drop zones allow you to quickly and easily swap out the video media in a complex fx sequence without hopping back to the fx application.
This pic displays the tell-tale "drop zone" graphic inviting the editor to drop in a piece of footage in the viewer on the left. In the canvas you can see where the clip will go, within a slowly rotating faux-web page:
Once the video clip is dropped into the Motion Template, all of the parameters and fx that you applied to a drop zone placeholder in Motion are instantly applied to the “dropped” clip within Final Cut. For a project that requires the same fx used multiple times with different video sources, this procedure literally saves hours over having to hop back and forth between After Effects and Final Cut. Once the template is built, swapping out the video clip is simple, and you can go back to Motion to edit the template if necessary – and then when the sequence is rendered back in FCP, everything is updated instantly.
Although Motion is similar enough to After Effects that I was able to stumble through it to make the template I needed, a thorough knowledge of the software will be necessary to really take advantage of its particle systems and other powerful features.I plan to do that just as soon as I find that elusive spare time, but in the meantime I’ll continue to use Motion Templates to streamline my workflow.
Ready to get started? Here is a link to a great tutorial on creating your own Motion templates.
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By Air Jordans