One of the great features in Apple Motion is the Particle Emitters, which has fully customizable parameters to achieve just about any effect. Let's use a Particle Emitter to add snow to our Winter Berries clip. Because the scene is a closeup of the berries, the snow flakes need to be large and fluffy.

Open the WinterBerries.motn file into Apple Motion^R.

1. With the imported image layer selected and the Playhead on frame 1, Go to Library - Particle Emitters and search "snow". Let's choose the Snow Flurry emitter and click Apply. You will get two new layers in the Scene1 group. The Blur11 layer, which is turned off, contains the image that the Emitter will use as a snowflake. The Snow Flurry layer contains two instances of the Blur11 png and a Random Motion.
   
   Let's view the playback to see the default snow animation. This is nice, but we need to increase the size of the snow flakes so that they are large and fluffy for the closeup scene. At this point, the small emitter bounding box is in the center of the Canvas. Let's increase the box to cover the entire Canvas.
   
   
2. Drag each corner handle of the Emitter bounding box to the edge of the Canvas so that the box covers the entire Canvas.
   
   The next change we need to make to the Emitter is to make the snow start on the first frame of the Timeline. By default, it takes a few frames before the snow appears. To make this change, we will increase the Emitter's Timebar on the mini-Timeline beyond the left edge (frame 1) of the Timeline. This will make the animation begin before frame 1. In fact, we will add 30 frames before frame 1 on the Timeline. You can think of them as invisible frames that play before the video starts.
   
   
3. To extend the Emitter's Timebar in the mini-Timeline, place your cursor at the left edge of the Timebar. The cursor will change to a Trim Pointer and a Tooltip will indicate the In Point (In: 1, Dur: 299). Drag the left edge of the Timebar beyond the beginning of the Timeline until the new In point is -30 frames (In: -30).
   
   Now we can play the scene again and the snow will appear on frame 1 and continue to the end of the scene.
   
   You will notice on the Timeline that the Snow Flurry emitter object bar continues past the last frame of our clip. The default duration of the Emitter is 299 frames and out clip has 120 frames. We can change the Out Point for the Emitter object bar to end on the last frame.
   
   
4. With the Snow Flurry Emitter selected and the Playhead at the last frame of the clip (frame 120), click Mark - Mark Out.
   
   

This is all we need for this video clip. We can export the video in the HD H.264 preset. We will be importing the clip in to our template and adding some animated text and design elements. Because the buyer will be customizing the text, we will just add the "Your Text Here" placeholder text.

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Holiday Season 2015 Motion Graphics Intro Video
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