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. The File Browser lists the contents of your hard drive and any connected external drives and the Project pane lists contents of each group or layer in our project.

At the left of the Motion^R workspace is the File Browser, which has three sections. The top section of the File Browser contains a preview window. This preview will show the contents of the selected item in the folder below. Below the Preview area is the Sidebar, which lists the contents of your hard drive and external drives. Below the Sidebar is the Stack which lists the contents within the selected folder.

1. In the Sidebar section of the File Browser, select the Desktop icon.
   
   
2. You will see the contents of your Desktop listed in the Stack section at the bottom of the File Browser. Locate the folder containing our video clip.
   
   
3. When you select the video clip, you can view a preview of the clip at the top of the File Browser. Next to the preview is some information such as the frames per second and resolution for the clip.
   
   
4. Click the Import button or drag the clip over to the Canvas. Use the dynamic guides that appear to center the clip on the Canvas.
   
   

Now that we have something on the Canvas, let’s take a look at the Project pane, which is between the File Browser and the Canvas. The Project pane contains three tabs; the Layers, Media and Audio tabs.

The Layers tab lists all the elements on the Canvas, which at this time is just our video clip. You may notice that when we imported the clip, Motion automatically created a new group and placed one layer containing our clip inside this group.

In the Layers list we can turn off the visibility of the group and/or layer by unchecking the box to the left of the name. You can also lock a group or layer by clicking the lock icon at the right.

As you would think, you can reposition the clip on the Canvas by dragging the clip. You can also scale the clip using the small blue handles of the all-to-familiar bounding box.

Once you have the clip imported, we can add special effects such as behaviors (animation), masks, filters and blend modes.

Note: When you save your project, you have the option to save a copy of the imported contents into the project folder. This makes it easy to locate all the contents for the project but will also result in duplicate contents on your hard drive. If you don’t have the space for duplicates, you can turn off this feature by unchecking the Copy to Folder option in the Save dialog box.

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