Motion 4. Powerful Compositing.

The intuitive yet powerful tools in Motion 4 make it easy to create a layered composite with any combination of 2D and 3D elements. For flawless compositing with video, you can stabilise a shaky shot, smoothly retime a clip, or precisely match the move of an object in your video.

Layering and grouping

Take advantage of unlimited groups and layers in Motion 4 to combine video, text and graphics. A group acts as a “parent” layer. For example, if you select a group in the Canvas and rotate it, all the objects within the group rotate.

You can also mix 2D and 3D groups in a single project. This allows you to do basic compositing with some elements of your project and complex 3D animations with other elements.

Use the Exposé feature in Motion to instantly access any layer; a single keystroke displays all layers as thumbnail views in the Canvas.

Sophisticated shapes and masks

Create a wide variety of shapes and masks with a choice of Bezier and B-spline tools. Convenient shape presets let you draw circles, rectangles and arbitrary shapes in a few clicks. Then you can give Sophisticated shapes and masks the shape just the look you want by adjusting parameters for opacity, colour, drop shadow, edge feathering and more. Quickly create a mask using the alpha, luminance or RGB values of an image.

Image stabilization and SmoothCam

Use Motion 4 to correct a shaky shot quickly and easily. You can use the stabilizer to lock down a shot without the time-consuming setup required by most stabilization tools. Or use the SmoothCam feature, which eliminates handheld camera jitters or bumps whilst retaining standard camera moves like pans, tilts and zooms.

Optical flow retiming

Motion 4 uses optical flow technology to produce crisp, clear retiming. Bring in a clip with a speed change set in Final Cut Pro and see all the details in the Keyframe Editor. Or apply revolutionary retiming behaviours that let you change the speed of a clip and set ramp-in and ramp-out parameters — all while your video continues to play back.

Point tracking and match moving

Motion 4 makes it easy to match the movement of an object in a video clip. For example, if the video shows a bus travelling across the screen, you can add a side-panel billboard that moves as the bus moves. Motion evaluates the video to suggest one or more tracking points, or you can set your own points. After you select the points you want, just click a button and Motion creates the match move.