Now that we have taken a tour of the Motion 5 workspace, let’s start a new project. We will be taking a closer look at a few of the menus and the Project Browser.

Apple Motion has pre-built objects, effects and other design elements, called content, that can be added to your projects. This content ranges from a simple static background to more complex particle animations, such as the Bokeh. You can drag and drop several elements to create impressive effects.

Motion Behaviors are drag and drop animations that you can apply to images, graphics, text and even imported videos. To apply a behavior takes a simple drag and drop from the Library and then you can customize the animation’s parameters in the HUD or Inspector to suit your project.

Text is an important design element in a Motion project. Common uses of text are lower thirds and titles. Once added, you will want to add special effects to the text such as Motion behaviors, masks, filters and blend modes. Let’s walk through the process for adding text to a Motion project.

Many Motion projects start with importing video into the workspace in order to add lower thirds and other effects to complete the project. Let’s walk through the steps for importing a video clip from a folder on our desktop into our project.

One of the best ways to learn a new software program is to get familiar with the user interface or workspace. The Apple Motion workspace is uncluttered but still contains a lot of resources ready to use in your projects.

Apple Motion excels in creating motion graphics because of the many presets that come package with the software. When used out-of-the-box, these presets can save you valuable time or when used as a starting point, they can make creating your custom project much easier.

Apple Motion is for animating graphic design over time. An artist can create a design layout combining image and text for an ad campaign but once you begin to move those objects around the screen, add in audio, transitions and special effects and your static design comes alive as motion graphics.

Apple has made some great changes to iMovie 10 that will make working on your videos even easier than before. The most obvious change is the new workspace, which has been simplified to contain very few buttons and panes.

Creative Cloud offers new and improved features for After Effects CC, Flash CC and PhoneGap. We see new live integration between CINEMA 4D and After Effects CC. Creative Cloud also makes creating apps with PhoneGap Build much easier and the Toolkit for CreateJS extension is now built into Flash CC.