Motion effects row

[cdnlor]

I have used S4 for years and just loaded S5 this week and am trying to get my head around some of the features.  For a prop you can have multiple motion effects rows.  What would be the purpose of this?  Would you only do this if you were assigning the rows to relate to different sections of a particular prop?  For example you have a matrix prop and you assign one motion row to the border and another row to the more inner pixels where you are running text.  Is there a reason you would have multiple motion effects rows relating to the same pixels?

Based on some quick testing, if you have two motion effects rows relating to the same part (or the entirety) of a prop and assign different effects to the two rows, it appeared that the effect of the bottom row took priority and only its effects were shown.  Is that by design or is that just the way it happen to work in my quick test?

[k6ccc]

You actually can have multiple motion effects on a prop at the same time - hence multiple rows (one of several reasons).  For example, lets say you have a square matrix prop.  You want the outer edge to do something - lets say a marquee.  You also want the center to do something totally unrelated.  For example, the photo is my P10 matrix.  There are four separate effects going on at the same time.  On the outer edge is a marquee.  At the bottom is fire.  Coming down from the top are meteors, and just for good measure, there are fireworks.  The effects rows are in that order (top to bottom).  Highly unlikely that you would want those four effects going on a matrix at the same time - but you could.  And yea, it looked better live than the quickie still photo.  And obviously a given pixel can only light one way, so if there are multiple effects trying to light the same pixel, somebody has to win.  Based on the really quick test, I will go along with your statement - the fire blocked out the marquee, but the meteors take out the fire, the the fireworks took out everything - but all on a pixel by pixel basis.  You can see meteors behind the fireworks - showing through where the fireworks blast is open.

Another reason is that you can define limited parts of a prop in a custom motion effects row.  For example you could have a motion effects row that only effects every other row of a matrix.  BTW, I learned that one only a couple nights ago - Thanks Matt!

You could also have an Motion Effect (or more) on a prop and also a SuperStar Effect on the same prop at the same time.

 

 

Edited April 8, 2020 by k6ccc

[cdnlor]

It makes sense now.   So you can apply more than one effect at the same time to the same group of pixels however each individual pixel can obviously only be doing one that at a time.  I think my initial test didn't lend itself well to seeing the effect.  I tried again by having snow effect falling into fire (similar to your picture) and it was obvious.  Thanks for the great example and pic.

[PhilMassey]

Think of it as video editing. I sometimes use two motion rows for the same prop and swap between them to do dissolves  between effects for smoother transitions.