Final Cut Pro X - Motion 5

New features that really get things moving.

Motion 5.3 introduces a clean new interface that matches Final Cut Pro and puts your work at center stage. Wide color support lets you see the full brilliance of your motion graphics. And 3D text enhancements make animated titles more realistic. There’s even support for the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, which puts key tools right on your keyboard.

The tools you always reach for. Close at hand.

Motion is optimized for the most powerful new Mac computers, including the new MacBook Pro. It supports the Touch Bar, so you can perform common functions or trigger complex tasks with a single tap. Navigate your project, adjust text formatting, fine-tune kerning, and more using Touch Bar tools that change automatically based on what you’ve selected.

Learn more about MacBook Pro

View your entire project at a glance, set the start and end points for playback, and navigate the timeline by dragging the playhead.

Change text formatting, instantly convert 2D titles to 3D, adjust kerning, and more.

Work with wide color video. And see it all come together brilliantly.

End-to-end support for wide color images lets you design with a more vibrant range of colors. Import wide color photos and videos and view them on supported Mac computers. Then export in standard Rec. 709 or wide Rec. 2020 color space.

Color Spaces – Rec. 709 vs. Rec. 2020

Chromaticity Diagram

2D and 3D Titles

Easily create beautiful 2D and 3D titles that you can animate with drag-and-drop behaviors and intuitive text animation tools. Dynamic, real-time feedback makes it easy to experiment freely.

3D Titles

Build 3D titles from scratch, design them with easy-to-use templates, or instantly convert any existing 2D title to 3D. Customize your 3D text with dozens of organic and artificial materials, or create your own. You can adjust the lighting, environment, and edges of your title and take advantage of powerful surface-shading options including texture maps, diffuse and specular reflection, and bump mapping. Cast shadows from any 3D title onto it and other objects in a 3D scene or add multiple lights, cameras, and tracking shots to create epic designs.¹

3D Text Materials

Create endless looks with over 90 Apple-designed 3D materials including various metal, wood, and stone surfaces. A unique layering system lets you construct photorealistic surfaces by combining attributes like plastic, metal, polished, or enamel and scratches and dents — without the need to understand complex material properties or terminology.

Text Creation Tools

Flexibly adjust a wide variety of text parameters, including position, opacity, rotation, format, style, and layout. Vector-based characters scale, skew, and rotate with pristine sharpness, while the modern engine in Motion lets you work with both right-to-left and vertical text for languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic. Simple search-and-replace functionality makes it easy to find and modify words and phrases across your entire project.

Text Animations

Quickly animate text on or off the screen by choosing from more than 100 behaviors, including Type On and Blur Out. You can easily modify parameters to get the look you want. Or use text-on-a-path to set your text in motion on a trajectory that angles, bends, or twists. You can also create unique animations simply by moving letters where you want them.

Sequence Text Behavior

Automatically ripple a text sequence one character, word, or line at a time. Manipulate a single glyph and adjust its parameters, then apply the behavior to animate those changes through the entire text sequence. You can also apply any of the more than 200 Text Sequence behavior presets for instant effects.

Adjust Glyph Tool

The Adjust Glyph tool offers an intuitive way to animate a text character in 3D. Just select the character and make adjustments right in the Canvas. Choose Move, Scale, Rotate, or Adjust Four Corner, which lets you skew or corner-pin the face, outline, glow, or shadow style of the character.

Text Generators

Text generators automate common tasks that otherwise would take hours to complete by hand. One generator lets you create numbers that count up or down in sequence or change randomly. You can also generate time-and-date sequences that play forward or backward, and set up timecode sequences for any standard frame rate. Or take any text file and use a generator to display lines of text in sequence.

Credit Rolls

Motion lets you set up a scroll in just a few steps — even for long lists of production credits. Just import a text file, or type the credits if you prefer. The Scroll behavior optimizes the speed based on whether you need progressive or interlaced outputs. To check the details of your text, jump to any location in the scroll by clicking the preview.

Motion Graphics for Final Cut Pro

Designed with editors in mind, Motion features a familiar interface that lets you easily create titles, transitions, and effects for Final Cut Pro.

Redesigned Interface

Design in a modern, streamlined interface that matches the look of Final Cut Pro and puts the focus on your work. A cleaner, more logical arrangement of icons throughout the interface puts the right tools in the right place.

Template Editor for Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro includes a rich content library featuring titles, transitions, effects, and generators. Open any of these templates in Motion for further customization, then publish your modified template to Final Cut Pro by saving it. The new template is available for use immediately.

Smart Motion Templates

Save time and enjoy creative flexibility as you edit in Final Cut Pro with adjustable animated templates for effects, titles, transitions, and generators. Create Smart Motion Templates with any combination of single parameters and rigs, which let you control a group of parameters with a simple slider, pop-up menu, or checkbox. If you set up templates with multiple aspect ratios, Final Cut Pro automatically uses the correct layout based on your footage.

Parameter Rigs

Rigs let you adjust related parameters with a single control — a slider, pop-up menu, or checkbox. For example, change the colors of all the objects in your project in a single step, or apply a complicated logo to a scene with a click. Set up rigs with drag-and-drop ease and change them at any time. Because rigs let you switch quickly among options in real time, they are ideal for Smart Motion Templates used by Final Cut Pro editors.

Powerful Design Tools

Motion features a real-time design engine that lets you see your work immediately, along with a deep set of tools and content for creating and animating complex motion graphics.

Real-Time Design Engine

The interactivity built into every aspect of Motion lets you make adjustments during live playback and instantly see results. Create animations without a second thought by recording your actions in real time as you move objects around on the Canvas.

Professional Content Libraries

Build stunning 2D and 3D compositions by choosing from more than 1900 Apple-designed, royalty-free elements — including vector artwork, high-resolution images, and animated design elements.

Full Keyframe Curve Editing

For precise control of the timing and position of all the elements in your animation, open the intuitive keyframe tools in Motion. Use flexible curve interpolation — with options such as Linear, Bezier, and Continuous — to quickly establish smooth parameter changes. You can also draw curves using a freehand tool, or move, stretch, and squish groups of keyframes using the Transform box.

Behaviors

Behaviors — such as Gravity, Repel, Throw, and Vortex — let you create natural-looking motion without programming. Just apply a behavior to any object, then adjust the duration and position in 2D or 3D space. You can combine behaviors for more complex motion effects. Choose special-purpose Text behaviors or the Audio behavior, which triggers parameter changes based on the audio frequency of a track. Select the new Align-To behavior to quickly maintain the alignment of two animated objects without the need for keyframes.

Generators

Create high-quality animated backgrounds with built-in generators — each with parameters to customize its look and animation. Choose from a collection of standard shapes, or take advantage of unique designs like Manga Lines and Spiral Graphics that offer a hand-drawn quality. All generators can be used as bump maps or textures on other objects — including 3D text.

Stunning Effects

Just drag and drop to assemble impressive animations, with a choice of more than 200 filters and effects built into Motion. Then fine-tune your work with precise controls.

Customizable Paint Effects

Create a unique look for your project by setting up your own paintbrushes and 3D strokes. Use any of the more than 140 brush presets. Or you can design your own brushes using color gradients or QuickTime files, and create pressure-sensitive brushstrokes that paint gradient colors or particle dabs. Easily make vector-based strokes weave through 3D space.

Advanced Particle Systems

Particles are used to create real-world effects such as smoke and sparkles, but they can also add dazzling details to any animation. Start with the built-in library of more than 200 particle emitter presets or design your own. Replicators let you set up mesmerizing, repeating patterns in 2D or 3D space, following a geometric shape.

Sophisticated Masking Tools

Masking lets you control when and how objects appear in your project. Rectangle and circle masks let you easily adjust shape, size, and feather amount using intuitive onscreen controls. Bezier and freehand mask tools allow you to quickly draw and adjust control points for more detailed work such as rotoscoping. Combine and blend shapes for more sophisticated masks, and use keyframes or tracking to animate any mask over time.

Easy Chroma Keying

Create an accurate chroma key in a single step. Just drag and drop the Keying filter for an instant chroma key that is accurate for most projects. If the green- or blue-screen background in your footage is unevenly lit, you can use advanced controls, including an intuitive color wheel, to fine-tune the results.

Optical Flow Retiming

Slow down or speed up your footage with stunning quality, thanks to the optical flow processing in Motion. Dynamic retiming behaviors let you adjust the speed while your clip is playing. You can slide retiming effects anywhere on the clip as you work, and apply ease-in/ease-out parameters to smoothly ramp in and out of retiming effects.

SmoothCam and Image Stabilization

SmoothCam eliminates camera jitters and bumps while retaining standard camera moves such as pans, tilts, and zooms. Image stabilization lets you smooth a bumpy camera move or lock down a shaky shot, without time-consuming setup. Both features use optical flow analysis for superior quality.

Match Moving and Point Tracking

Motion lets you quickly create a motion path that tracks a moving object in a video clip. Motion analyzes the path of the object and suggests the best potential tracking points, eliminating hours of trial and error. Attach images, particles, filters, paint strokes, or the control points of a mask to any tracking path.

Broad Image Format Support

Work seamlessly with a wide range of common graphics file formats, including BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and Targa. Motion also supports PDF and layered Photoshop (PSD) files, and it’s easy to combine multiple formats in a single project.

FxPlug 3

FxPlug 3 is Apple’s standard for filters and effects. Choose from more than 130 built-in FxPlug filters and generators or explore the thriving ecosystem of third-party FxPlug 3 effects. These effects can support 64-bit processing and GPU acceleration — including dual-GPU playback and rendering on Mac Pro. Third-party plug-ins can include custom interfaces with unique controls that appear right in Motion and can be published to Final Cut Pro.

Learn more about third–party products

Effortless 3D

Video editors can use Motion to create beautiful 3D animations without programming. The 3D environment offers familiar, intuitive tools, with real-time results as you work.

3D Environment

Instantly transition from 2D to 3D space by adding a camera or cameras to any 2D project while preserving your 2D groups. Then animate cameras to create breathtaking movement in 3D space and give 3D objects a realistic look with controls for depth of field, shadows, and reflections. Bring in 3D particles and replicator patterns for more elaborate projects.

Shadows

Creating realistic 3D shadows has never been easier. Set up point lights and spot lights to cast a shadow, then select the objects that will receive the shadow. You can fine-tune the appearance of any shadow by specifying colors and edge types. When you set your elements in motion, the shadows animate dynamically with the movement of objects and lights.

Reflections

Reflections add excitement or realism to objects moving in 3D space. Turn any shape, video plane, or paint stroke into a reflective surface, add blur to soften reflections, and use the Falloff feature to fade reflections as the object moves away from the light.

Depth of Field

Selectively define focus as an object moves in 3D space. Quickly define a range of focus that lets you highlight or de-emphasize various objects and see the results as you experiment. To create a rack-focus effect, just add Focus behaviors.

Camera Framing Behavior

Track objects or groups of objects with drag-and-drop ease by applying the Camera Framing behavior. Onscreen controls let you adjust how each object is framed by the camera. Apply the Camera Framing behavior repeatedly over time to animate the camera passing from one object to another.

Breakthrough Speed, Quality, and Output

Work faster than ever at the highest quality — even with complex projects, large image files, and sophisticated effects. And design with confidence, knowing that your colors are pristine throughout your workflow.

Optimized for GPUs

Motion uses the high-speed GPU on the graphics card to speed up tasks across the app. And Motion is optimized to use both GPUs in Mac Pro so you can render and export faster and create deeper, more complex effects that play in real time as you work.

High-Quality Rendering

The high-quality rendering in Motion makes it possible to compute realistic effects with extraordinary precision using floating-point, linear-light color space calculations. You get the same exceptional results for blurs, scales, and lighting effects as you would from high-end compositing software.

Shared Render Engine

Motion shares a render engine with Final Cut Pro and Compressor for consistent speed and quality across applications. The engine allows Motion projects to play back in Final Cut Pro without rendering, so you can get to work immediately.

ColorSync-Managed Color Pipeline

Motion relies on Apple’s ColorSync color management for display and processing, producing accurate and consistent color from import through render and export. Colors look the same whether you’re playing back media in Motion, Final Cut Pro, or QuickTime.

64-Bit Architecture

Like Final Cut Pro, Motion is a 64-bit application. This means it can support deeper, more interesting multilayered effects for use in Final Cut Pro.

Resolution Independence

Motion has no size limit for still images or clips. You can import and export images of any size without scaling or cropping.

Single-Step Export Settings

Use the Share menu for output options that are preconfigured for popular devices and destinations. Export projects in formats for iPad, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, DVD, or Blu-ray discs,² or publish directly to destinations such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook. You can also export to formats such as ProRes 422, ProRes 4444, and H.264. Export a QuickTime file of your project to import your motion graphics into other applications like iMovie.

ProRes 4444

4:4:4:4

3840×2160

ProRes 4444 produces the highest possible quality and can include an alpha channel for working with masks and transparencies. Thanks to fast ProRes decoding, you can preview your projects in real time as you work. Export in ProRes 4444 for output that matches the quality of uncompressed formats at a fraction of the file size.

Working with Compressor

Use Compressor to tap into a full range of professional encoding features. Send a project to Compressor or create custom output settings for reuse in Motion. You can share these custom settings with other Motion users, even if they don’t have Compressor installed on their systems.

Learn more about Compressor