Adding video to Rectangle but how!?!

Hello Motion experts. I could do with a little help on this one if someone has some ideas, I would be very grateful. I am editing a trailer and need to replace a so called “Cyber Room” that someone else edited into the trailer. Actually what I have to do is replace the edited material that runs on the screen on the wall in the “Cyber Room” Thing is that I just do not get it how it is built in Motion. I have taken the Motion project home and am looking at it, But still do not get, how it works!?!

The first 2 screen shots (Top Left/Right) show the room with the screen. There is a photo with text, at the beginning of the sequence, on the screen, on the wall and when this disappears I need to put in my edited sequence. (The easiest way I could imagine is making a freeze frame when the animated photo is finished and exporting this out as a Mov to FCP X with a length of animated photo plus my edited clip that I want to put where the black screen is. But this would be a workaround and It kind of defeats the purpose of the Motion project!)I would like to understand how this works.

I can figure out what pretty much every thing is except for the Rectangle and Guides that are switched off near the top of the stack and the second rectangle towards the bottom of the stack. (Second from Top Left/Right) The last screen shot shows how things are stacked up in the motion timeline.

I am guessing that at the end of the day it is going to come down to an Alpha mask/drop zone or some mix of the 2! Any suggestions would be greatly welcomed.

me no 'expert', but ......

perhaps I don't understand your problem correctly - but simply replacing that rectangle by your video doesn't to the trick??

as far as I can see (screenshots are too tiny for my ol' eyes), that grey rectangle is basically a placeholder. The moment you need video 'on it', replace it by your stuff ... or 'add' it on top of it. Hopefully, animation is done to the group, not each element alone …

… or do you need that Motion-Project as a template? Then, replace rectangle by a 'drop zone'.

... hu? :blink:

Hi Karsten

Thanks for your response. Yeah the boxes were for the video. I finally managed to get in touch with the previous editor and the way he explained it sounded pretty much like "Rigging." He claimed that I could do a right click on the video clip in the timeline in FCP X and then insert the video there.

Maybe I am stupid because I did not get this to work in FCPX and ended up animating my videos on top of the background (Cyber Room) in FCP X.

Also I wanted to avoid going from Motion to FCPX as basically everything was changing on an hourly basis. But that is another story. :sick:

I am not going to invest too much energy in learning more about Motion round tripping at the moment as it seems reasonable to assume that every thing is going to change again, very soon.

thanks for your response all the same

I appreciate it

Paul

Change the rectangles to Drop Zones. Then you can drop anything (video, still, graphic) into it inside FCP X. And you can always just right-click the Motion tempnlate inside of FCP X, change in Motion, Save, it is immediately reflected in FCP X.