Motion workflow question from a newy

Alright, I'm brand new to both FCP, Motion, LAFCPUG, and Mac. I came from the Avid PC side. Anyway, I have a really basic question:

I've been doing a couple of moving backgrounds and such in motion and then importing them into FCP to place behind my footage. Right now, I've been saving the motion files as .motn. Is this the right format or the best format to save these as?

I'm just asking because when I'm digging through the finder, looking at my motion files, it seems to be saving every frame as a small, seperate file or something. Is this right?

Like I said, I'm a new born babe when it comes to motion ect., so please excuse me if this question has a really obvious answer.

P.S. I did do a little searching before I posted. If I didn't see a particular post dealing with this same issue, feel free to post a link to it.

Sounds about right, to me. I believe you can set a default folder to store those file in, so you can find them later. Those small files are project files (I think that's is what you are talking about)

Are you digging Motion as a composing app?

Motion doesn't save every frame separately as a project - a Motion .motn project file contains all the clips that you have placed in the timeline, and other elements like particles. The .motn file is the "native" file format of Motion, so this is the best option to use when you're importing into FCP, because it allows the easiest round-tripping between Motion and FCP.

If you have noticed a lot of .motn files on your hard drive, it's possible that you have been poking around in the auto-save vault, which is normally located in your home folder ~/Documents/Motion Documents/Autosave Vault. The projects in this folder don't contain single frames, but timed backups of all the projects that you work on in Motion, even untitled ones (which are removed when you close an untitled project without saving). You normally don't need to open these from the Finder, as Motion 2 has the ability to access them by date and time when you open your original project, in case you need to go back a few versions.

-- Greg

Hey, thanks alot. It could be that I accidentally went to the auto save folder (like I said, new to mac and motion).