Motion is a powerful animation tool that allows you to create stunning 2D and 3D motion graphics. For a lot of video editors, making their first steps into animation can be a little overwhelming. Fortunately, with Apple Motion templates, you can easily create amazing animations for your films.
Motion is the animation companion to Final Cut Pro, and the two programs work together to allow seamless integration of animated compositions into your video work. In fact, Motion templates can also be installed to work as native FCP plugins. But before we get ahead of ourselves, we’re going to first show you some of our favorite Apple Motion templates, then how you can start working with them today!
Summary
Part 1: Top Apple Motion Templates
Motion templates come in all shapes and sizes and can allow you to do extraordinary things. To help make things easier to find, we’ve split the below templates into five categories: Promos & Openers, Titles, Transitions, Slideshows, and Motion Graphics.
Promos, Openers & Logos
1. Ink Cinematic Titles
The Ink Cinematic Titles make the perfect moody opening title sequence for a thriller or drama piece. The slow-moving, intricate ink blots provide a unique and stylish introduction to your videos and could be well placed in music and event videos.
Download Ink Cinematic Titles Now
2. Logo Reveal Strips Opener
The Strips Opener is a versatile template that can be used as a logo indent, title sequence, or a short promo video. The grids and lines give the template a technology feel, while the fast-paced animation feels packed with action.
Download Logo Reveal Strips Opener Now
3. The Book Promo
The Book Promo template is what you think it is, a promo film for your book. Simply replace the book cover placeholder with your own and add your text for a promo that is sure to wow your viewers. And here’s a tip: it doesn’t have to be used just for books! Use it with anything that will fit the rectangular shape like DVDs, computer software, even a box of cereal.
4. Real Estate Promo
This template has a simple but elegant design, making it perfect for highlighting beautiful photos or videos. The large text area allows you to pack the video with information without distracting from your images.
Download Real Estate Promo Now
5. Real Estate Promo
The Minimal Clean Logo indent pack contains 3 variants on the animation, allowing it to fit more logo shapes. The dynamic animation is clean and straightforward, but still filled with personality, making it the perfect intro to any video.
Download Real Estate Promo Now
6. Elegant Dark Logo Reveal
This high quality, professional-looking logo indent is perfect for impressing even the most sophisticated of viewers. Add your logo to the placeholder, and see it transformed into a classy, reflective 3D animation.
Download Elegant Dark Logo Reveal Now
7. Instagram Stories V.5
Perfect for Valentine’s day, or any day you want to share the love, this template is made specifically for Instagram Stories. Replace the placeholders with your a video or image of your choice and edit the text to create the perfect love story, ready to share with your followers.
Download Instagram Stories V.5 Now
Titles & Text
8. Earth Planet Titles
The Earth Planet Titles template comes with all the video elements you need for an out of this world opening title sequence. Replace the 7 text placeholders, render, and you’re ready to blast off.
Download Earth Planet Titles Now
9. Call Out
This template is an excellent addition to any editor’s tool kit. Add Call Out text elements to any part of your image, and animate to move with the video. These little call-out boxes are perfect for product videos, documentaries, and you can even use them in a title sequence.
10. Titles Animator
The Titles Animator pack is super easy to use and can add a stylish touch to any video project. The lines and polygon shapes masking the text give a graphical look to the effect, perfect for designers and photographers.
11. Neon Titles
This fun neon Lower Third titles pack is perfect for promo, music, and Youtube videos. The glowing bright colors and dynamic animation perfectly highlight the text elements and are sure to impress your audience.
12. Digital Glitch
The Digital Glitch pack contains 8 dynamic split-color text effects. These animations work with any font, simply drag and drop, edit the text, and you’re ready to go. This glitchy style is perfect for fast-paced videos such as events and music videos.
Transitions
13. Colorful Transitions Pack
This pack of 8 transitions is perfect for typography and explainer videos. The bright colors, popping animation and funky shapes make it ideal for anyone taking their first steps into Motion animation, or those that want to add a fun little transition set to Final Cut Pro.
Download Colorful Transitions Pack Now
Slideshows
14. Nice Slideshow
The Nice Slideshow contains a massive 18 video and text placeholders, making it perfect for showreels and portfolio videos. The dynamic and colorful slide transitions and text animations don’t distract from your image or messages, allowing you to make a powerful statement with your video.
15. Happy Slideshow
This easy to use modern slideshow template make a cool intro to any video or can be used on its own for a showreel video. The snappy transitions and clean text make it perfect for fashion, photography, and events based videos.
16. Beautiful Slideshow
The Beautiful Slideshow offers stunning, smooth transitions with a parallax effect. Geometric shaped panels slide your viewer from image to image, with Gaussian Blur effects giving a glass-like quality to the animation.
Download Beautiful Slideshow Now
17. Mosaic Slideshow
This elegant and modern design is perfect for presentations and profile videos. The built-up mosaic squares provide a unique style to the overall video, while the customizable color palette allows the video to be on-brand.
Motion Graphics
18. Motion Graphics Pack
This huge Motion Graphics pack is perfect for editors who want to dramatically expand their editing tools. Containing 30 typography scenes, 30 animated elements, and 130 shape transitions, this pack has something to suit any project.
Download Motion Graphics Pack Now
19. Waveform Audio Visualization
This fantastic template allows you to create visual waveform effects for your audio. Perfect for any music-related video, the Waveform Audio Visualization template can be used with both photo and video media.
Download Waveform Audio Visualization Now
20. Smart Infographics – Circle Charts
Graphs and Charts are a great way of displaying complex information visually, and the Smart Infographics template lets you do this in just a few clicks. The template has both pie and ring charts, which can be customized with your own data, colors, and text.
Download Smart Infographics – Circle Charts Now
Part 2: How to Use Apple Motion Templates
Now that you have found your chosen template, you need to decide what you want to do with it. You can open your template in Motion with just a double click on the file, but the program’s true power is how it links with Final Cut Pro. Let’s look at how you can quickly install your Motion template for use in Final Cut Pro, and customize the design.
Step 1: Install with Final Cut Pro
Once you have downloaded your template, you will need to install it correctly before you can begin editing. It isn’t a complicated process, but it does require you remembering a specific file directory.
- Open up two Finder windows. In the first, open your downloads folder (or wherever you saved the download) and open the .zip file you have downloaded.
- In the second Finder window, go to your Applications folder and find Final Cut Pro X.
- Right-click on the FCP icon and select Show Package Contents.
- Click on the following folders in order: Contents > Plugins > Media Providers > MotionEffect.fxp > Contents > Resources > Templates.
- Choose the appropriate folder from the options: Generators, Titles, Effects, and Transitions.
- Go to your first finder window and copy (Command + C) the file.
- Go to the second Finder window and paste (Command + V) the effect into the new folder. Open Final Cut Pro and your plugins will be available to use in the relevant panel.
Step 2: Customizing in Motion
You have some customization options available in FCP for your titles and colors, but if you want to change the animation, you’ll need to do so in Motion. Customizing your templates can be a huge timesaver! If you need to use the same brand colors and fonts, you can edit these elements in Motion, to save you doing it each time in FCP.
- In Final Cut, find the template you want to customize in the Effects panel.
- Right-click on the template preview and select Open Copy in Motion.
- Make any changes you want to the project.
Step 3: Saving for Final Cut Pro
Once you’ve made the changes, you will need to save the template back to Final Cut Pro. This is where Motion and Final Cut become like a single program, seamlessly working together to make your life a whole lot easier.
- Go to File > Save As.
- Give your animation a title, and if you want to choose a category and theme.
- Hit Publish.
- Return to FCP, and your new template is now ready to use. It really is that simple.
To develop your skills further, check out these beginner to advanced Motion tutorials.
So, that’s how to install Motion templates. As you can see, the process for working with templates like the ones we’ve shown you here is both quick and easy. There are thousands of impressive Apple Motion templates available to download, allowing you to expand your editing capabilities, and keep those viewers coming back for more!
