Final Cut tip: PAL and NTSC Motion projects

As I’ve been using Adobe After Effects over 10 years or so, it’s difficult to move over to Apple Motion, even though I haven’t upgraded my copy of AE past 6.5.

One of the things to watch out for in Motion is that you cannot change the frame rate of your project once you create it. A current project required an animation that works at 25 and 29.97 frames per second. You can always change the frame rate in After Effects, but I wanted to use the particle presets in Motion.

The way to generate animations at both frame rates is to set the frame rate to a multiple of 25 and 30 – 150fps:

Motion always tries to play projects at their full frame rate, but degrades well, so you’ll see your animation play smoothly as fast as your computer can play it.

There seems to be a bug in QuickTime export from Motion 3.0.2, even if you choose to export at 25 or 30 or 29.97 frames per second, it will still export at the full frame rate of the project. You need to Export using Compressor to get your outputs at PAL/NTSC or p25/p30.