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Apple Motion to Adobe After Effects
- Thread starter 4God
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Mileage may vary...
I should say that my test machine is running Motion 4 and AE CS5.5. If you're on different versions I won't be able to speak to the success of these tactics.
There are a couple of things to try...
Start a new Motion project and drop the template that you're after into the project. Save this out as a Motion project.
In After Effects, import this Motion project as you would any other media. Drop it into your comp or start a new one based on it's parameters by dropping it on the New Composition icon in the project pane.
Hopefully, you're done and this worked. Works for me. The beauty of this is that you can go back to tweak the Motion project by clicking on it in the Project pane or Timeline and going to Edit > Edit Original (⌘+E) This should relaunch the original Motion project again. Tweak it, resave it and edits should bounce back to AE.
If none of this works for you then you could, of course, make the Motion project and render it out, import the QT movie (or whatever) into AE. But this will flatten the inter-operability. The elegant round-tripping will be no more.
Edit: There *used* to be a page on Apple's site way-back-when that documented this.
http://www.apple.com/pro/techniques/motionaftereffects/
Here it is on the Way Back Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101012041108/http://www.apple.com/pro/techniques/motionaftereffects/
I should say that my test machine is running Motion 4 and AE CS5.5. If you're on different versions I won't be able to speak to the success of these tactics.
There are a couple of things to try...
Start a new Motion project and drop the template that you're after into the project. Save this out as a Motion project.
In After Effects, import this Motion project as you would any other media. Drop it into your comp or start a new one based on it's parameters by dropping it on the New Composition icon in the project pane.
Hopefully, you're done and this worked. Works for me. The beauty of this is that you can go back to tweak the Motion project by clicking on it in the Project pane or Timeline and going to Edit > Edit Original (⌘+E) This should relaunch the original Motion project again. Tweak it, resave it and edits should bounce back to AE.
If none of this works for you then you could, of course, make the Motion project and render it out, import the QT movie (or whatever) into AE. But this will flatten the inter-operability. The elegant round-tripping will be no more.
Edit: There *used* to be a page on Apple's site way-back-when that documented this.
http://www.apple.com/pro/techniques/motionaftereffects/
Here it is on the Way Back Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101012041108/http://www.apple.com/pro/techniques/motionaftereffects/
Last edited:
Thanks for your reply. Dang, it seems to only work in older versions. I'm on Motion 5 and After Effects CC. I get an error message that says "XMLv5 is not compatible."
Yes, XML is the underlying pinion here as a Motion project is truly but a big, complex XML file.
I don't have a way to test this right now as I'm away from my workstation and this is a TOTAL longshot! But I'm wondering if you could "trick" AE into recognizing the XML file? Theoretically, you could open the Motion project (or for safety, a copy) in a text editor like TextWrangler and modify the "XML version" tag in the file. Again, I have no idea if a simple workaround like this could force things to function. You'd need to know what XML version AE CC does accept.
That was a good idea, anything under 5.0 seems to at least attempt to import. The only thing is that it errors on a few of the .mov files and all the images are just black. So close....
Shoot! It's frustrating to feel like you're right around the corner from a breakthrough. Maybe this can't be strong-armed into working like it did before. I hope you find solution.
It is frustrating to be so close. There has to be a solution. If I manage to get it figured out, I'll post it here. Thanks again for your time.