Motion 4. Easy-to-Use Text and Titling Tools.

Motion 4 includes a wide variety of text and titling tools that let you quickly shape and animate text. New text behaviors let you ripple text onto or off the screen by adjusting one character, and you can create a credit roll in seconds.

Working with Text

Ripple a word or phrase just by altering a single character.

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Text tool

Use the Text tool to generate vector-based text that scales, skews, and rotates while maintaining sharpness. Adjust position, opacity, and rotation, as well as format, style, and layout parameters.

To get started, choose a system font or one of Apple’s unique LiveFonts — animated fonts that would take hours, if not days, to create by hand.

Style settings allow you to customize colour and opacity for the character face, outline, glow, and drop shadow. Styles can be saved in the Library and applied in any project.

Adjust Glyph tool

The new Adjust Glyph tool allows you to manipulate a character in a text object the same way you manipulate any shape in 3D. Just select the character to make adjustments directly in the Canvas. Options include Move, Scale, Rotate, and Adjust Four Corner, which lets you skew or corner-pin the face, outline, glow, or shadow style of the character.

Text on a path

Easily place and animate text along a path. Angle, bend, and twist the path to create interesting trajectories, including paths that move on a plane through 3D space.

Text Animation behaviors

Text Animation behaviors include Scroll Text, Text Tracking, Type On, and Sequence Text. The Sequence Text behavior lets you ripple a text sequence one character, word, or line at a time — and even modify all of the glyph attributes. Just manipulate a single letter, and Motion animates the change through the entire sequence.

Text Sequence behaviors

Save time by choosing one of 149 new preset Text Sequence behaviors, which feature a wide variety of playful or dramatic effects, such as Scramble In or Shimmer Out, for animating text onto or off the screen. Highlight effects include Scale Through, which makes the text look as if a magnifying glass is being passed over each letter in turn. You can use any preset as is or modify its parameters to get just the effect you want.

Text generators

Four new Text generators make it easy to create and animate text sequences. Apply the Numbers generator to create an animation that counts up or down in sequence or at random. The Time Date generator lets you animate time-and-date sequences either forward or backward.

Use the Timecode generator to create running timecode sequences in any standard frame rate. The File generator allows you to rapidly sequence lines from the text contained in a file.

Credit rolls

Now you can create and edit even a long list of production credits with ease. Just import a text file or type in your credits using the new Scroll layout in the Text tool. An innovative graphical interface lets you jump to any location in the credits with a click.

After you’ve set up your list, apply the new Scroll Text behavior to animate the credit roll in a single step. If you want to make refinements, you can adjust the speed with a slider and set an option to reduce flicker for progressive or interlaced outputs.