Apple Motion 2 - Manual (Page 53)

Chapter 1 Getting To Know Motion 53
To move backward a specific number of frames:
m Type “–” (minus) followed by the number of frames you want to move backward.
To modify the current frame or duration dynamically:
m Click the center area of the field (where the numbers are), then drag to the left to
increase the value, or to the right to decrease the value.
Dragging the Current Frame field in this way is equivalent to dragging the playhead
through the mini-Timeline.
To switch between timecode and frame numbers, do one of the following:
m Click the Current Frame icon directly to the left of the Current Frame field.
m Click the Duration icon directly to the left of the Project Duration field.
Clicking either icon switches between frame and timecode view for all controls in all
open projects.
The Project Pane
Once you begin building more complex projects, you may need to view the
components of your project in a list. You can view and modify the hierarchy of layers
and objects, including grouping objects and changing layer order. You can turn certain
objects and effects on and off to temporarily simplify your composition. You can view
and modify the media files associated with the objects in your project. You can also
modify certain attributes of the objects, such as opacity, blend mode, and audio levels.
Counting Time
Motion offers two different ways of looking at the frame numbers for your project.
You can view the time as incremental frames, starting at 1 or 0 and continuing
indefinitely. Or, you can view the time in the video-standard, eight-digit timecode
system, which runs like a clock from 00:00:00:00 to 23:59:59:29. The first two digits
represent the hours; the second two, the minutes; the third two, the seconds; and the
final two, the frames, as in HH:MM:SS:FF.
Some formats of timecode also skip numbers in order to accommodate the inexact
frame rates of certain video formats.
Both frames and timecode have advantages, depending mainly on the format with
which you are originating and finishing. For example, if you are designing a title
sequence for a 35mm film that must be exactly 720 frames, it is easier to set your
counters to frames.
If you are building a television spot that is going to be laid onto a videotape or
broadcast, you would probably benefit from setting your counters to timecode, so
that the frame numbers correspond with the numbers on the videotape.
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