In this tutorial, we will continue to work on our holiday message animation in Motion^R. In the last tutorial, we created the graphic elements in Photoshop, which we will now import in to our Motion project.

Our Photoshop^R image has five layers including the background layer, the shadow text layer, the message text layer, snow indentation text and company name layer. When we import our image into Motion, we need to keep these layers in the correct order and maintain the transparency of the top four layers.

Let's start a new Motion project and import our .psd Photoshop image. But before we do this, we need to rasterize all the layer styles, because the layer styles will not import into Motion. In Photoshop, right-click on each layer that contains a layer style and choose Rasterize Layer Style from the pop-up menu.

1. Start a new Motion project. We have an empty Project layer and one empty Group layer. Rename the Project layer to whatever you choose.
   
   
2. Click File - Import to import your Photoshop image. Choose All Layers from the pop-up menu, which will maintain all the layers in your image.
   
   Motion will create a new group layer and name it Group 1. Inside this new layer is another sub group layer with the same name as your image. The individual layers in your imported image become sub layers of this second group layer.
   
   
3. Rename the new Group 1 layer containing your graphic to 'Photoshop 1'. Do not lock this layer. See note below as to why.
   
   
4. Move the default empty Group layer above the new Photoshop 1 layer.
   
   

Note: The All Layers option imports your Photoshop image with the layers maintained correctly, including the transparent layers. As stated above, Motion creates a new group layer and places your image into that layer. However, a problem arises if that group layer is locked when you save your project. Motion turns those nice transparent layers into merged layers. The result is several layers containing the same merged image. However, if you do not lock the group layer, Motion will maintain the layer transparency when you save and then reopen the project again in to Motion. This might be a temporary bug but as of now, that's what happens.

Tutorial Example:


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