Apple Motion: Understanding Clones Tutorial

A basic beginner's introductory tutorial explaining the use of Clones, when to use them, how to use them, and how to harness their exceptional power.

[@JasonRamasami]

7 years later and this is still doing it.

[@flatfilm5755]

these basic lectures on understanding the key positions of the program are more useful than ever Many thanks for the work and time spent for everyone who needed it.

[@marcelocaneschi6576]

7 years later and this is still doing it and we learn this again and I noticed I haven't hit LIKE before... how bad me! It's a nice REWIND WEDNESDAY! Thank you! And Simon, what's the different between THROW and MOVE behaviors? I gotta learn this again, hehe!

[@SimonUbsdell]

Thanks. Your question is a tricky one to answer in a KZbin comment, but I would suggest that Move is simply a more complicated version of Throw, although that doesn't quite cover it.

[@KenHudson]

Darn...just when I thought I understood clones well, I watch your video and learn so many more tidbits about them, I find I did not know. Thanks again for this very informative video.

[@3sh3sh1977]

I just find your channel 4 days ago and since that , the only channel that I saw on KZbin is yours , you are really amazing very talented and very professional , can you make a tutorial for apple motion 5 for beginners ? as your videos are very very professionals and when I try to do it lot of keys and features I don't even understand !! 😩, so we need a tutorial for better understanding the apple motion in general first

[@starkhanian]

simon we appreciate you sir. thank you for all these tutorials.

[@SimonUbsdell]

And thanks to you, and so many others, for your support. Much appreciated.

[@markdixon5525]

Your tutorials are brilliant and I also particularly like these types of lessons in which you dive into your thinking a bit more. I’d love it if you could make more tutorials that really help us get inside your thought process. For instance, “I want to create finished visual X, and so I know right away that I’ll need to first head out in Y direction, add some Z elements, and then that will give me the structure I’ll need to accomplish my goal. I’m having some trouble unraveling the infinite possibilities into practical animation outcomes. I’ll keep looking, but I would pay for a training that really gets inside your thought process in a nuanced way. Thank you so much for all of your tutorials! I have been inspired to keep trying because you have shown me what is possible.

[@andersutterstrom6089]

We were discussing cloning the other day. I think I said: Didn't Simon explain it a while back? Well, I understand it even better after watching your explanation again, tonight. The key was when you explained that the properties are the only parameters that the clones do not inherit. Cheers!

[@SimonUbsdell]

Thanks, Anders. I was thinking about doing maybe a few more of these types of videos. I was wanting to do one on the issue of when and when not to use Stencil with an Image Mask ... mainly because it's something I keep having to do a mental check to get right even after all this time.

[@alexrets3454]

Simon, thank you very much for the new useful tutorial as always!

[@Offthesticks]

Great tutorial Simon. makes things a lot clearer. Looking forward to more from you.

[@BenjaminGib]

Wow, thank you, Simon, for this superb valuable information, and presenting it so well. I definitely did not know about clones NOT sharing everything under the Properties tab. Thanks again.

[@dw2Video]

Simon - I loved this video. You always seem to find the tips and tricks in Motion that are great timesavers for those of us who don't spend as much time in Motion. I watch nearly everyone of your videos. Keep up the great work....I'm always anxious to see what you do next.

[@Rockysvideostation]

Very knowledgeable Simon. Thank You!

[@a_nick_t]

Nice job Simon. Great info. Thanks

[@rstoecklmayer]

great tutorials ! thank you, that you doing this

[@albinasliutkus703]

BIG THAKS Simon for your work on motion 5

[@geekco1602]

As usual, great tutorial. :-)

[@trippy_blob]

7 years and i still found it usefil

[@jmotionworks6041]

An other great one! Thxs for Sharing!

[@user-sf4vp7oh8m]

For me personally, this news is worse than the news of a pandemic. Why don't you come back? In any case, thank you very much for your years of virtual apprenticeship.

[@scottfoster3643]

Thank you sir!

[@AzovPort]

Thank you!

[@willv88]

I think it's probably important to call out that Simon chose to duplicate the clone as opposed to cloning the clone. Coming from a programming background I'd venture a guess and say that this is an optimization. By duplicating the clone you have two instances that inherit the top layer clone (say A is the original, B is the clone, and C is the duplicate of B). The way Simon does it, A has two children (B and C) as opposed to creating 3 generations: A has a child B, and B has a child C. Thanks Simon!

[@SimonUbsdell]

Yes, that's exactly right. Although in some cases perhaps you might want C to be the child of B (eg. you want C to inherit the filters you have applied to B in addition to what it's inherited from A) and that works too - you can make a Clone of a Clone, or indeed and Clone of a Clone of a Clone, and so on. As you say it's important to understand the hierarchy (parentage) of the instances you are creating.

[@mihimarugt5204]

THX~I recently practiced AE, it was really strong~

[@SimonUbsdell]

There's a lot to learn but it's well worth the effort. Once you discover expressions, you will really see the power of Ae.

[@KenHudson]

I am not familiar with AE, but keep hearing so many talk about it's ability to do expressions. It seems(at least to me) that if Apple would just include AppleScript hooks into Motion 5, we might be able to do that same thing. Your thoughts?

[@SaurabSalhotra]

Do you have courses? Im trying to find a tutor and you seem to know the philosophy behind a lot of softwares.

[@rogerioprada6600]

Hi, Simon! Once again a great tutorial! I'm from Brazil and I've been trying to make a transition in Motion using clones, but its properties don't apply to masks. The transition I'm trying to make is a cube divided horizontally. I call it "split cube". It's a two second transition, the upper half begins to rotate and 20 frames later the lower half starts its rotation. Can you develop a tutorial for that? Thank you very much!!

[@squeaky_buddha]

WOW!

[@Shohaiko]

Hey simon, have you checked out the tut for the raindrops on the glass pane in A-AF (From Vid CoPilot). I tried messing with it little bit, but I failed. Are you planning on doing that? I would love to be able to do that in motion.

[@SimonUbsdell]

I hadn't seen that one yet - thanks for pointing it out. Yes, it should be possible to do something very similar in Motion. I'll give it some thought.

[@elvst3331]

hi Simon, could you provide the link to your color correction tutorials you did for motion please. thanks

[@AbdulSamad-ln5tc]

I have a question similar to cloning. I have a number layer and I want the number to increment by +1 if I duplicate the layer. If the first layer has number 5 written in it then I want the duplicate to say 6. Is that possible to do in Apple Motion?

[@SimonUbsdell]

Not possible in Motion. Motion doesn't have a way of accessing layer indices, unlike After Effects.

[@jasonsolan8395]

Great tutorial, but, I am noticing that when I scale my text clones up, they start to pixelate very noticeably starting around 120%. Am I doing something wrong? Seems that, especially, text would scale up sharp no matter the size.

[@SimonUbsdell]

Try setting your Render settings to Best.

[@jasonsolan8395]

Grrrrrr...it's always the little things :) Thank you Simon, your work here is helpful, valued, and appreciated.

[@SimonUbsdell]

To be fair, it's a bit odd that you have to change the render settings to get around this.It looks as though the Clone process is rasterising the Text in Normal mode and requires Best in order not to do so. Compare that with what happens with ordinary shapes and so on, which don't get rasterised like this in Normal mode. It's probably a bug, or rather an oversight.

[@jasonsolan8395]

Well, once I saw your suggestion I felt silly that I'd overlooked that. You're exactly right, though. It seemed that the clomed text would have rendered as well as shapes, because I've noticed that behavior. Also got slightly thrown off by Render>Resolution>Full and Render>Quality>Best...though I understand the difference, it's a little too much micromanaging in the 'heat of battle' for me ;)

[@SimonUbsdell]

I have to say that managing the render settings can indeed be a "battle" with Motion. I was working on a job a few months back where the Best render settings were introducing a consistent glitch into a camera move across a starfield. I had to settle for Normal in that case to avoid the glitch and pretend that the resultant flickering (not present in Best mode) was a "creative choice" ;-)

[@bendavis1135]

Morning. I'm just learning Motion for work, and as yet havnt had a lot of training. Does anyone know what the 'reset parameter' actually does? I'm sure its something very simple, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

[@SimonUbsdell]

Resetting any parameter returns its value to the defaults, so for example if you reset the X position, you will get a value of zero. In some cases you can reset a set of parameters to their defaults all at once, so for example, you can reset all the position parameters to zero to resetting the Position group rather than just one of the individual parameters, or you could reset the entire Transform group (Position/Rotation/Scale/Shear/Anchor Point) by using the reset option for the entire Transform panel.

[@bendavis1135]

Ah ha, I think I get it. Still feeling my way round in the dark with Motion, but your videos are proving to be a massive learning tool. Thank you for replying quickly too.

[@SimonUbsdell]

Always happy to try and answer your questions - if I can. Good luck with learning Motion.

[@motionlemon205]

i make a clone layer but not showing "Time Remap" Option. Why ??

[@SimonUbsdell]

Have you made sure to 'Show' the Timing controls? Stupidly Apple have decided to make the Show/Hide buttons invisible until you hover over them and so not is not obvious that a whole new panel opens up when you click.

[@pixelrancher]

Wayback Wednesday brought me here.

[@toddlask]

Attack of the Clones! Sorry, had to!

[@SimonUbsdell]

And there I was trying so hard not to do the Star Wars gag!

[@toddlask]

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.