Aha, so I could have found the Flexi-Arrow Lite the first time, if I’d just looked under the Generators instead of the Titles. Just for fun, and to test this, I made a copy of the Flexi-Arrow Lite Title and changed its file type back to .mtn, and presto, sure enough, there it was as a generator. So now I can find it as either a Title or a Generator.
Yes, it does sound like that Theolait arrow generator is too complicated to mess around with under the hood, to try to slow down the arrow animation. Too bad, because it’s a nice arrow generator with some interesting features, as you noted: you can make the arrow into dashed or dotted lines, and also put a wide stroke or outline on it of any color (I tried coloring the arrow, with a wide outline, with the colors of the national flags, so that the arrow somewhat matched its accompanying flag. It looked kind of nice—see my screenshot). But the Theolait arrow just runs across maps too fast to suit me, so I won’t be finding much use for it.
I actually like your Flexi-Arrow Lite the best of all, with all its extra flexibility and its wide range of possible animation speeds. It’s the best arrow generator I’ve seen, of any of them, for my purposes. You did a really nice job on it. Owing to its versatility I’ll be using it in many places in this documentary. I kind of miss the nice drop shadow that the original Flexi-Arrow has though, so if you ever tinker around with the Lite arrow again maybe you can add that.
Again I appreciate your detailed explanation of how shapes can be controlled in Motion using onscreen controls. Some of it doesn’t mean much to me at the moment, because I’m still unfamiliar with the workings of Motion 5, but I’m sure that as I learn to use the program it will come to make sense.
I also think Karsten’s suggested method of making individual animated arrows for each map inside Motion, with their accompanying flags, and using each as a FCPX Project, is something with great possibilities, so I’m going to follow his instructions and try that too.
I very much appreciate the help of both of you on this project. I am working with three World War Two vets (two of them 94 years old, and a young one of 92) telling me about their experiences in the war on-camera, and as they speak in this documentary, I can bring up these maps with the arrows showing how they moved around in the Pacific war theater. And since they were all crewmen on a B-24 bomber, a four-engine airplane with a range of a couple thousand miles (they routinely flew 15-hour missions), these Flexi-Arrows are going to be ranging over a lot of map territory.
Thanks again,
Tom B.
