If you need to create many craft videos showing how to use your craft products, you can save a lot of time by using a Motion 5 template and drop zones. Let’s see what our options are for doing just that.

For those of you unfamiliar with templates, let’s talk a little about them. A Motion template is a .motn file that is used as a starting point for other projects. Of course, any Motion file can be this. What makes a Motion^R template special is the repeating design elements.

Let’s take our how-to demo for example. Each how-to demo has two parts. The first part is all the images, video clips and lower third text pertaining to the craft product that you are demonstrating. These design elements will of course be different for each product demo video. The second part of the demo video is the process of stringing all these images, clips and text together into a slide show style presentation. This is done by adding Motion transitions. These parameter values, animations, behaviors, filters and other motion effects that make up the transitions remain the same for each demo video.

I bet you can see where we are going with this. A .motn file that already contains all these unchanging effects and only needs the images/videos and text replaced is called a template. To make using this template easy, it contains placeholders for the changeable content. We can just drag and drop the new media content from the file browser or library into these placeholders, which are called drop zones in Motion. Then all we need to do is change the existing lower thirds text with our new text using the text tool.

There are two ways to use drop zones. You can create empty drop zone objects on the canvas or convert an existing object into a drop zone object. The method you would use depends on your approach to creating a template.

If this is your first how-to demo for a product, you will have many design decisions to make. So, you would probably want to build a prototype. In that way, you can make the important decisions and finalize the style with this prototype. Then, you can convert the changeable media to drop zones and save the final .motn file as your template.

In a previous tutorial, we created a logo reveal that will be used for all new 2014 products and how-to videos. We exported this as an .mov file in order to reuse it for each new product trailer. Once we create our template, we can add this logo reveal to the beginning of the template. When a new logo reveal animation is chosen for 2015, we can still use the same template and just import the 2015 logo reveal at the beginning of the timeline.

Sample Project

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