Behaviors are primarily used to animate objects. When you want to fade in an object, move a camera along a path, or animate text, behaviors allow you to do these things (and many others) without setting keyframes.
In a nutshell, there are two behavior types: “regular” and parameter. Regular behaviors (usually referred to simply as behaviors) can affect one or many parameters of an object. Parameter behaviors are applied to a single object parameter and, therefore, affect only that parameter.
You have several methods for applying behaviors. This first method allows you to preview the various behaviors.
• Click the Apply button at the top of the Inspector.
• Drag the behavior to the destination object in the Layers tab or Canvas.
When you know which behavior you need, the following method provides quick access using the toolbar.
After you’ve applied a behavior, you may need to tweak its settings. You’ll find the parameters of the selected behavior in the Behaviors tab of the Inspector and in the HUD.
You can move or duplicate a behavior from one object to another.
You can adjust a behavior’s timing and duration in the mini-Timeline or Timeline, just as you would modify other objects.
To change a behavior’s duration:
To alter the timing of a behavior relative to the applied object:
In this section, you’ll examine examples of some specific behavior uses. (You will also find behaviors specific to text, shapes, paint strokes, particle systems, and replicators in their respective chapters of this book.)
Several Retiming behaviors are available in Motion. They allow you to create flash frames, perform looped playback, and strobe and stutter clip playback. Set Speed is one Retiming behavior that allows you to create ramped speed effects within a clip.
Tracking is a variant of the behaviors that, by themselves, do not “do” something to a video object. Instead, Tracking creates motion data about every pixel, such as determining where a pixel went from one frame to the next. This data may then be used to “attach” other objects such as graphics.
After analyzing the video, you will apply another behavior, Match Move, to a second object.
As you can guess, these two behaviors do what their names imply. The Stabilize behavior can self-analyze a video clip or use tracker/tracker data to remove unwanted movement. The Unstabilize behavior can match new elements to original camera movement in a video clip. You must use tracker data created by another behavior (such as the Analyze Motion behavior) as the source of the camera movement.
In addition to dragging parameter behaviors to apply them (as you would a regular behavior), you can also use the shortcut menus.
Parameter behaviors appear in the Inspector’s Behaviors tab. They are modified just like regular behaviors but have one special parameter: Apply To.
This section explores a few of the available parameter behaviors. See the Motion 4 User Manual for more information on all of the parameter behaviors.
The Audio parameter behavior allows you to animate an object’s parameters according to the frequencies and amplitudes of an audio file.
When you need to animate one object in relation to another object’s animation, the Link behavior can save you time and frustration. In essence, you are linking the behaviors applied to a parameter of one object to the same or even a different parameter of another object.
It may have a funny name, but when you just need an object to jiggle, Wriggle is your go-to behavior.
The following figure illustrates the result of the Wriggle behavior applied to an object’s Position parameter.
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