PE4 - Motion

I originally considered continuing on with my Flash CS5 tutorials on lynda.com, but I did want to take a peek at the Motion tutorials to try and get a handle on a program that I use with my school’s daily news show. With Livetype being added into the Motion 4 suite, the learning curve for me has been quite annoying.

Having used Livetype exclusively for my lower 3rd’s and intro sequencing, trying to learn something on the fly has been quite daunting. For this week’s practical experiences, it seems a natural to combine something I need for my professional career with something needed for my educational career as well.

There are so many features in each of the different functions I am very pleased that the Motion instructor Ian takes his time to show each individual feature on every tab. As I have gone through the first 5 videos, I can already see the similarities to some of the tabs in Livetype, which is very nice.

I spent my lunch break today (YAY for teacher workdays and long lunches!!!) finishing up the beginning two Motion modules. At this point I will admit to still being an Apple Newbie. It is quite hard to believe that it has only been 3 years since I made the transformation from PC to Mac. In that time though, it is still nice to see that file management is in my estimation ten times easier. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to add files to the project pane if Motion was PC based.

Now that I’m done with the Introduction and Getting Started modules, next up is working with assets on the timeline and project panes and creating shapes and masks. But that’s for the next PE blog post.