Motion 5 Tip: Using any Motion 4 project preset

If you have Motion 4, you might miss all the project presets you are used to.

The internal format of these presets is the same for Motion 5. That means you can copy the presets you’d like to use from inside Motion 4 to Motion 5.

To see the wide variety of project templates in Motion 4, view its contents (by right- or control-clicking the Motion 4 app and choosing ‘Show Package Contents’ from the context menu), and navigate to

Motion 4.app / Contents / Resources / English.lproj / Presets / Project

If you’d like some of these presets in Motion 5, use the following method.

It might be a good idea to try this tip on a duplicate copy of the Motion 5 application, but it seemed to work on the original installed version with no problems on my installation.

In a new window, view Motion 5’s contents and navigate to

Motion.app / Contents / Resources / English.lproj / Presets / Project

Option-drag the presets you want to copy from Motion 4 to Motion 5.

When you next run Motion 5, you’ll have the option to choose from a wider range of project presets.

If you don’t have Motion 4, you can open up the presets inside 5 and use them as the basis of new presets.

They can be opened and edited in TextEdit. Here’s the one for ‘PAL DV’:

If change the Description, FieldDominance, FrameRate, Height, PixelAspect and Width to match the specification of the format you are creating the preset for.

The value above for FieldDominance is 2, which sets the preset to interlaced, lower field first. A value of 1 indicates interlaced, upper field first. 0 means progressive.

Values for FrameRate include 23.98, 25, 29.969999999999999, 50 and 59.939999999999998

Values for PixelAspect include: 0.909090909090909, 1, 1.3333330154418945, 1.5

Once you have made your changes, save them with the name you want your preset to have with the ‘.preset’ suffix, you’ll have a new preset to put inside Motion 5. Save it in

Motion.app / Contents / Resources / English.lproj / Presets / Project

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