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When you launch Motion the first time, you will see the Welcome Screen, and you
will notice you have four options. The top two take you to the Apple Website,
where you can view Quick Tours and online Tutorials of Motion.
The next option, Start with a Template, is great because this is where Apple
gives you some professionally designed templates you can use in your projects.
Also, as you get more familiar with the application, I encourage you to come
back to Templates so you can reverse engineer the projects and learn some new techniques.
For right now, let's choose Start with a New Project, but before we click
Continue, make sure to go down to the bottom and deselect the Show the Welcome
Screen at startup option. This way the Welcome menu won't pop up the
next time we launch Motion. Click Continue. Now we have the Select Project Preset dialog
box. This is where we can set the resolution of
our project. If you click on the pulldown menu, you will
see a large list of formats that Apple supports, and if you don't see the one
you are looking for, you can always come down to the bottom and click Custom and
choose your own specific format. Typically when you set your resolution, you
want to set it to match the camera that you have used to shoot the majority of
your footage. Now, for this training series, the majority
of footage was shot at DVCPRO HD 720p24. So let's go ahead and choose that.
Now, since we don't want to have to click on this pulldown menu every single
time as we continue through this series, go ahead and click the Set as Default
button, and now every time this menu pops up it will automatically choose DVCPRO HD
720p24. There is one last little gotcha.
In this dialog box, you might think you can click on the Duration and change the
overall length of the project you are creating. This is actually incorrect.
This is not where you can do that change. You have to actually create the project first
and then go in and change its duration. We'll show you how to do that as we continue
to tour the interface later in this chapter. So for right now, let's go ahead and click
OK. Now we have gone into Motion.
If you would like to bring up any of those dialog boxes in the future, you can
always go to Motion > Preferences, and change your options at Startup.
We'll get more into Preferences in the Essential Preferences video later on in this chapter.
So now that we have changed these options for the most common workflow in this
title, we'll able to jump into Motion a little more quickly the next time.