Motion 3: Fixed Resolution Tip

I came across this great video from MacBreak about Motion’s  Fixed Resolution; what it is, when to use, when not to use it. Mark Spencer and Alex Lindsay give three examples:

• Illustrator Media (Fixed Resolution should be off to maintain vector scaling quality)
• Photoshop Layers (Fixed Resolution should be off to move a layer outside of the layers’ group boundary – the original image resolution)
• Particles (Fixed Resolution can be switched on to limit the particles to the canvas resolution)

I came across another scenario where Fixed resolution comes into play, and that is when certain filters are restricted  by the boundary of the element that they are applied to. In the example below I am using a Light Rays filter on a Text Object. You can see straight away that the Light Rays are cut off which is probably no what you want. In this case the Filter has it’s center relative to the Text’s anchor point.

Cut off Light Rays Filter

Now what you could do is apply the filter to the Group that the Text Object is contained in. However this still does not produce the desired effect. This time the Light Rays Filter is centered on the Group’s anchor point which is smack in the middle – hence the change of angle of the rays.

Cut off Light Rays Filter on Group

Here is where Fixed Resolution comes to the rescue. Selecting the Group and setting Fixed Resolution to on results in a Light Rays effect that does not cut off. Why is this? If anyone has a technical answer why this is the case I will ecstatically happy to hear it, I thought that the Fixed Resolution was supposed to behave in the opposite manner displayed here.

Nice cool Light Rays, yayyy

I adjusted the center point to produce a more dramatic portrayal of the change. Obviously if you wanted the effect to disappear past the canvas then it would not matter.