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User profile for user: sjmvideo
sjmvideo Author
User level: Level 1
13 points

I want to merge motion projects together

[I am a relatively new Motion user. Did one music visualizer project about 2 years ago following YouTube tutorial. Poked around with a little bit ever since.]


I am animating a sequence of an artist's 17 illustrations that tell a story. The background stays the same while the objects move around and it gets progressively more elaborately drawn.

So I have 17 Photoshop files with a bunch of layers. I converted them all to motion projects in Pixelmater.

My first thought was to animate each one individually in Motion, save them as generators, then string out the generators in FCP. I'm thinking that will give me more flexibility to experiment than exporting each one as a movie. Right now the transition between each illustration would be a dissolve or fade to black. It would also make media management simpler with smaller motion projects.


If we decide we want to animate the transitions between panels that would require building the entire project inside of Motion. Is there an easy way to assemble multiple motion projects together into one?


Right now each panel Motion file is a static conversion from PSD, so I could probably just import the the individual PSD files for each panel instead of the motion projects. As long as I didn't have any animations in that panel to preserve.


For anyone interested in what I'm starting with, here are two basic idea tests:

17 images with dip to black between them.

17 images with cross dissolve between them.


Feel free to watch them at 2x, there is nothing yet during the 5 seconds of the illustrations being shown.


Thanks for your thoughts.

Steven

MacBook Pro (2021)

Posted on Jun 2, 2023 9:18 AM

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User profile for user: rowie302
rowie302
User level: Level 4
1,290 points

Posted on Jun 2, 2023 2:10 PM

Hi


You can get all of them into a single project file by using your library.


Open one of the Motion projects that you made. Go to the library and note the favorites folder.



Use the create new folder function to add a new folder here. Name it as you need.


Next, make sure you have everything in the project grouped into 1 main group and name that group as you need. Then drag that group into the library.



Now, in any other Motion project, you can then go to your library and drag that group in.


If you use the 1st project as the main project, then go to all the subsequent projects and add them to your library. Then in the main project, just add them all in.


Now you can create your dissolves and fades by animating the groups.


A couple of things to consider.


1: You may need to adjust the duration of the main project so that there is enough room for everything along the timeline, so make it as long as the FCP project duration would be


2: Your additions from the library will confirm to the project duration they were added from, so layers are likely to need to shorter than the entire project duration when you add them - just use the normal keyboard commands to restore them to the full duration


3: Any animations you already applied in each individual motion project will be intact...when you save a group to your favorites folder..all of your animations go with it


The library is a great utility for Motion. You can use it to build up your own collection of assets so that you can easily apply them again to other projects.


Please let us know if you have any issues with this.








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User profile for user: rowie302
rowie302
User level: Level 4
1,290 points

Jun 2, 2023 2:10 PM in response to sjmvideo

Hi


You can get all of them into a single project file by using your library.


Open one of the Motion projects that you made. Go to the library and note the favorites folder.



Use the create new folder function to add a new folder here. Name it as you need.


Next, make sure you have everything in the project grouped into 1 main group and name that group as you need. Then drag that group into the library.



Now, in any other Motion project, you can then go to your library and drag that group in.


If you use the 1st project as the main project, then go to all the subsequent projects and add them to your library. Then in the main project, just add them all in.


Now you can create your dissolves and fades by animating the groups.


A couple of things to consider.


1: You may need to adjust the duration of the main project so that there is enough room for everything along the timeline, so make it as long as the FCP project duration would be


2: Your additions from the library will confirm to the project duration they were added from, so layers are likely to need to shorter than the entire project duration when you add them - just use the normal keyboard commands to restore them to the full duration


3: Any animations you already applied in each individual motion project will be intact...when you save a group to your favorites folder..all of your animations go with it


The library is a great utility for Motion. You can use it to build up your own collection of assets so that you can easily apply them again to other projects.


Please let us know if you have any issues with this.








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User profile for user: claude_210
claude_210
User level: Level 1
52 points

Jun 2, 2023 1:23 PM in response to sjmvideo

I basically do what you do just by simply creating as many Motion projects than I need, then selecting a camera and sharing a mov file with the camera angle I need.


I didn't bother creating generators as I believe these are done to be reused in more than one FCP project which is not my case, and I didn't suffer any lack of flexibility sharing mov files. On the contrary, I can check right away from the OS viewer what is their content is without starting Motion or FCP. May be I am wrong.

FCP is great at tweaking transitions and I don't think Motion is good at that. You could design animated transitions within your Motion project and then tweaked at will to simply cut off in the shared clip in FCP. A matter of taste I suppose.


Does that help?

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User profile for user: sjmvideo
sjmvideo Author
User level: Level 1
13 points

Jun 7, 2023 3:11 PM in response to claude_210

Thanks claude_210 I've been playing around a little and I think your might be right as far as simply exporting the videos from motion. I thought maybe rigging the animation so I can make tweaks in FCP might be useful, but that would be too advanced for the deadline and my skills.

I might want to extend some of the individual object animations between the illustrations. Like the moth between 1 and 2. Then I will look at the library option that rowie302 is suggesting.

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I want to merge motion projects together

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