Now before we start experimenting let us take a tour to the work space. When motion in your space opens you see four main sections. You open up the remaining two by using your keyboard shortcuts. As you can see I have my common motion interface open here. Now if I hit F5, it opens my project pane which is right here which shows my layers. Now if I press F6 it opens up my timeline and as you can see right here is my layers list which is the exact same thing as the list right here. Hit F5 and F6 to close them and F5 and F6 to open them.

Remember F5 is your layers and F6 is your timing pane. Now the canvas right here is pretty well named. It is where you paint your composites, I guess. Is the part of the work space where you will preview your work and make changes and things, add the location and rotation of elements in your screen, kind of think of the canvas as the stage and the elements of your composites as the actors and props. They are there to move around as you want.

Now if anytime you want to hide your other windows and concentrate on just your canvas, press F8. there you go as you can see where I got this screen capture kind of scaled down it is not showing you right but if I hit F8 it just shows the canvas. It is all it is. It just zeros out the canvas. If you want to concentrate on the canvas and see nothing else then hit F8. It will kind of frame it in a neutral gray color and then press F8 again to let it go back to normal view.

Now the utility window, it is very busy. It is where you import footage in the file browser tab which is right here and I have all this here. You can browse for filters and effects which is right here in the library, Behaviors, filters, particles imaging, that kind of thing. Parameters are the values of the object’s property such as scale, on screen position and opacity and by going to the inspector you can adjust the properties the behavior the filters and the object itself. The project thing is all about organizing all your elements. That is what it is about. You got to make sure that they are layered on each other on the right order so when I open my project pane by hitting F5. Right here.

Remember, you have to pay attention to your order it also helps for you to single out and change single part of your composites sometimes.

Now to the timing pane, now press F6 to open the timing pane. The timing pane is where you decide what happens when. It also is where you can be more precise about how things slow down, speed up, stop using the key frame editor. Now that is the basic interface. Over here is the file browser, here is the canvas and here is the timing pane. This little button here adjusts the size of your canvas. And you go to a hundred percent as you can see it scales to a hundred percent. Fit in window fits it into the window. This is motion three by the way. This over here is your view, you have a split view. Split horizontal and vertical view when you can have a four up view. Just keep it at the single view for now.

And then there is the view tab which allows you to show your rulers, your grids, your overlays and your safe zones and we will talk more about that later.

Now I want to teach you some keyboard shortcuts. You know it is getting time to dive into motion and I know you all want to play but we need to make a quick stop to make some keyboard shortcuts. Anyone who has spent time using a professional software application like motion knows that keyboard shortcuts, single keys or combinations that quickly perform common tasks are essential to working efficiently. Motion has a lot of keyboard shortcuts and you will be learning the ones that matter most because of the density of windows and the views in motion, it is kind of important to learn the shortcut keys that will quickly open or close the sections of the interface, you often need the F5 and F6 key.

If you spent most of your time other applications such as final cut pro or adobe after effects you can use the command there to set up the keyboard shortcuts that work best for you but we will cover that in another section. Let us get some keyboard shortcuts. F5 your project layers pane, F6 your timing pane, F1 your properties tab, F2 your behaviors tab, F3 your filters tab, F4 your object tab, F7 brings up your hub and F8 makes your canvas full screen.

This was a brief overview of the main keyboard shortcuts. Do not panic I will remind you of the shortcuts throughout this whole lesson but they are really worth trying to learn by heart. Forget the shortcuts for opening and closing windows, you can open and close windows from the window menu or you can use the icons on the toolbar up here. You know you have got hud, file browser, you probably could not see the screen capture but you can just click the icon here for your project or whatever you are going to do. So this has been a basic overview of the motion interface. Now remember that the first you open your project it will ask you what you want you are preset to be. You want your preset to be what your final render is going to be. So if you are working on a DV clip, make sure that your preset is DV. If you have any questions about this quick overview of the interface, let me know.

Stay tuned for lesson two and we are going to get in to it and start experimenting a little bit and get our hands dirty. So I hope you learned something. If you have any questions get a hold of me at www.finalcutstudios.com. I will answer any questions I can and I hope you learned something. See you next time.