In the last Motion tutorial, we created the first two Drop Zones for our craft trailer template. The Drop Zones were placeholders for the background image and the intro clip. In this tutorial, we will add a transition to the end of the Drop Zone for the intro clip.

You might ask why we wouldn’t add the ending transition to the intro clip itself. Well, we could but we will have more flexibility if we add the transition to the placeholder. For example, we might want to use an intro that was longer than the 10 seconds that we have allocated in the template for the intro clip. We could easily make adjustments to the imported clip to change the duration of the clip. But we would be trimming off the transition. By adding the transition to the template instead of the intro clip, we are assured that the transition will perform as expected.

Open your working copy of the template file and let’s get started. Here is our Timeline at this point. If you review the previous tutorial, we decided to use a half second (15 frames) fade transition at the beginning and ending of each Drop Zone. One exception is the Drop Zone for the intro clip, as we don’t need a fade-in transition at the beginning of the trailer.

1. Click on the Motion^R icon on your dock and choose the Open Other option at the bottom of the Project Browser. Choose your working .motn file.
   
   We will need to start the fade-out transition 15 seconds before the end of the intro clip Drop Zone, which ends at 10 seconds on the Timeline. So we will start the fade-out at 00:00:09:15 on the Timeline.
   
   A fade transition is created by manipulating the percentage of opacity of a layer. To fade-out a layer we will set the opacity of the layer at 100% at the beginning of the transition and at 0% at the end of the transition. We will use the Record feature to set these two opacity values on the Timeline.
   
   
2. Place the Playhead at the 00:00:10:00 position on the Timeline, which is the end of the transition.
   
   
3. Select the IntroClip Drop Zone in the Layers pane.
   
   
4. Select the Record button to start recording on the Timeline.
   
   
5. In the Properties tab in the Inspector, set the Opacity to 0%.
   
   You should see two keyframes appear on the Timeline. They are small read dots at the beginning and ending of the IntroClip.
   
   
6. Move the Playhead to the 00:00:9:15 position on the Timeline, which is the beginning of the transition.
   
   
7. Go back to the Inspector and set the Opacity to 100%.
   
   You should see one more keyframe added at the 9:15 position on the Timeline.
   
   
8. Click the Record button again to stop recording.
   
   

Finished Project Trailer

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