How To Create Video Travel Maps With Apple Motion

Instead of using iMovie travel maps, you can create an animated travel map using any background map you have and trace a detailed route onto it. The video will show the route being drawn onto the map. You can even add a graphic or icon to follow the path.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create custom video travel maps using Apple Motion.
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Recently I did a video on using the Travel Maps that are built into iMovie. But a lot of people wanted to know how to create custom travel maps using any map background they want, tracing a specific route on the road or trail, and maybe even using graphics inside, like a little car icon or something. You can do that using Apple Motion. 
MOTION is an app from Apple. You get it in the App Store. It costs $50. and it is basically Apple's answer to Adobe Aftereffects. You can do tons of different video animations using it. This is definitely more complex than doing it in iMovie. But you can get just about any result that you want. 
So let's create a new Motion project. The idea here is that we're just going to export this as a video to use somewhere else. In this Motion project the first thing I want to do is have the map. So I've got a Map graphic already. I'm just going to add it here to the layers and now it appears here in the Timeline. Just a map. It doesn't do anything. The next thing I want to do now is draw a line that follows a trail. So I can zoom in here quite a bit and move around and I could find a spot, say, where I want to begin. So let's say I want to start right here. I can draw using a variety of different tools. They'll all work for this. 
I can use the drawing tool right here and actually draw on, which is hard when it is zoomed in like this, but I can also use the Bezier tool or the B-Spline tool. I'll use the Bezier tool. It just is going to allow me to create a series of points. I click for a point, click for another point and I can make it as detailed or as vague as I want. I'm just going to go and continue to draw on the different points to follow the trail. Now when I'm done I'm going to double click on this last one and it will finish it. Now you can see here, if I zoom back out, it creates a shape and it fills it in which isn't what we want, of course. So I'm going to go to the Inspector here on the left with the shape selected and turn Fill off. So now we just have a line. I can set the color for this line here. Under Brush Color let's pick something like a bright red, like that. I could also set the width. So I can make it really thick or let's make it nice and thin here, like 2pt, like that. 
Now when I click to deselect that layer you can see my line there. It is just a line that's another layer here just like the map. So all I've done is just draw on a line. I'm going to further customize it by selecting it here and if I click I can click one of these points. Notice if I Control click it I can smooth out that point. What I want to do before I do that is just, with one point selected do Command A to select All and then I'm going to Control Click and smooth. Now all the points are smoothed out. So instead of these little hard corners every time I put a dot now it's going to be nice and smooth. So that's what I've got right now. I've got a nice smooth curve that more or less follows that trail. 
To animate it so it Draws On I'm going to use a Behavior. I'm going to select the Bezier curve here and I'm going to go to Behaviors and under Shape there's Write On which is, you know, basically draw on, draw it on over the course of its appearance on the timeline. So I do that and now if I scrub here you can see how it draws the whole thing, like that. I can go to Inspector here with the Behavior selected, I can see here this is the Write On Behavior, and I can do some things like for instance I can have the Speed go from Constant to Ease In or Ease Out or both. So it accelerates in. Has a constant speed and then decelerates at the end. I can have it accelerate or decelerate throughout the entire thing. You can play with these. I'll just keep it at a constant speed here. So it draws it all on. At this point I could be done. I could just export this.
But you can see I can highly customize this now. I can make the line there. I can make it a different color. I can make it a different width, for instance. There are other properties I can play with as well including the Brushed type even. The Behavior I can change that as well in several different ways. So there's a lot you can do in addition to having your own custom map and everything. 
Let's say you want to have an icon. Like if this was a map of the world a little airplane or in this case maybe a little hiker. So let's go and bring in a Hiker Graphic that I've prepared. I will drop it in here at the top because I want it to appear above the map. I'm going to shrink it a bit. This is huge. So in the Inspector for the hiker here I'll go to Properties and I'm going to scale it down quite a bit. Make it something smaller like that. So notice the hiker here, of course,  started at wherever I had the timeline. This is a constant pane in motion. Always putting it there you need to drag it over and have it kind of match the beginning, right there. So everything is going to basically take the same amount of time. The hiker will be right now just sitting there the entire time, the entire 5 seconds. 
Let's have the hiker actually follow the path now. So I'm going to select, I could select the hiker or the group that contains the hiker, they are the same right now. I can set a Behavior for that. The Behavior I can set for it is for Basic Motion and then I can have it follow a motion path. You can see how it puts a line there. That's the Motion Path. I can move back and forth and I can see it is following that path. I don't want it to follow that line path. I want it to follow the curve. The way I can do that is under a Motion Path right here. I can go  and say, what is the path shape. Not an open spline but follow with specific geometry. Then it creates this little drag and drop box. I can drag the Bezier curve into that and now the hiker will follow that curve. There you go There's the hiker at the top and the hiker just follows along like that. If I deselect everything so you don't see the motion path notice that the hiker is being drawn at the location where the line is currently at. So they match each other. Of course that is because the motion path here is following the same speed, Constant in this case, as the Write On behavior, Constant. So you want to make sure those match else one will maybe get ahead of one of the other and all of that. 
Now one last thing you may want to do is actually have the hiker point in the right direction. So the hiker always seems to be moving forward. A better graphic may be, for instance, this kayak. I'm going to add that to this group here. So the kayak appears right there. I'm going to go to the Inspector, Properties. Let's scale the kayak down. Let's get rid of the hiker. Now the kayak is there. Now if I wanted it to point in the right direction I would add to the Group here, in addition to the Motion Path, I also want to add the basic motion of Snap Alignment To Motion. Now, once again you can see I need to move the kayak back to the beginning there, and Snap Alignment To Motion both there. It always is better if you add new things when you've got the timeline at the very beginning. But now you can see the kayak, if I deselect it, the kayak is always going to kind of orient itself at the trail. But unfortunately that is giving us a sideways kayak. So what we can do here in Motion Path is we can change the access to Vertical. There we go. So now it is pointing forward every time. So you could see the kayak follows the path. That could be a car on a road or a plane in the sky. That kind of thing. I get the nice animation of it moving along. 
If you want to use this in another project you just go to File, and then Share, and then export this as a movie. I've got Settings and I can change Settings. Notice the resolution is 1920 by 1080. That's what this project was created in. If I go to Edit, Project Properties, that's where I could actually change the presets. Say to 4K for instance if I needed that. Probably would have done that in the very beginning. But you can go to Share, Export. Let's just Export this using the default settings. Open up in Quick Time Player and you can see it play out here. I've got this video that I can now just import and use in anyway I want in some other app. 
There's tons of other stuff you can do in Motion. It's a huge app. I've shown you a tiny sliver of what it is capable of. So it is a lot of fun to play with if you like creating video, creating animation, and you like experimenting and exploring. Hope you found this useful Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Create Video Travel Maps With Apple Motion”

Art Busbey

1 year ago

Can't this same thing be largely accomplished in Keynote using the move along a path feature (which you aptly covered in a MacMost video a number of years ago)?

Gary Rosenzweig

Art: Wait for it. The next in this short series is for Keynote.

Robert Bailey

Gary, in Motion Preferences (or Settings) under the Project tab, you can change the annoying (if it is) behavior of newly imported objects entering at the playhead position by choosing "create layers: at start of project"

Robert: Good find!

Bill Bruckner

I'd love to see more tips on using Apple Motion to create effects you can import to iMovie.

Ken

Gary, Great video. I used Motion once before for an effect for a FinalCut Video. It seemed so complicated (I followed a youtube video step by step). The explanation you presented was great. Look forward to more ways/ideas and techniques for Motion. Thanks. Ken

Comments Closed.

How To Create Video Travel Maps With Apple Motion

Comments: 6 Responses to “How To Create Video Travel Maps With Apple Motion”

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