Retiming Video in Motion

Changing the duration of a clip in Apple’s Motion is really easy:

Select your clip in either the Project Pane (F5) or the Timing Pane (F6) then go to the Inspector (cmd + 3).  At the bottom is the Timing drill-down menu.

Timing Options

Timing Options

From here you can decide whether you want to change the speed of the entire clip or use variable speed changes throughout the clip. This is done using the Time Remap option at the top.

You also have options for changing the speed as a percentage value. This is the same as in most other editors like Final Cut and Adobe Premiere or After Effects. You can set new in and out points, change the overall duration of the clip, reverse the action and choose the frame blending that you want to use on your clip.

The options for frame blending are:

  • None – Uses the nearest frame as source.
  • Blending – (Default) creates a blend of the pixels from neighbouring frames.
  • Motion-Blur – Adds a blur.
  • Optical Flow – Checks out your footage and does a pretty decent job of creating new, very smooth frames. This does however, take time to analyse the clip, but in many cases the wait is worth it!

The bottom line though is to pick the type of blending appropriate to your footage. If you have a sports scene, maybe motion-blur will work well. Try them out to see what works best.

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