A Q U A F A D A S

G e t th e mo s t o f yo ur digita l life

P U L P M OT I O N 2
First Steps

Cap Omega, Rond Point Benjamin Franklin 34960 Montpellier France

w w w. p u l p m o t i o n . c o m
O r g a n i z a t i o n N a m e
P r o p o s a l Ti t l e

2
 Table of Contents

Welcome ! 1

Before we start 2

PulpMotion vs PulpMotion Advanceed 2

Installing PulpMotion 2

Understanding where PulpMotion keeps its dependencies on your disk 3

Introduction 4

Create a New Composition 5

The PulpMotion Interface 6

Creating a composition 10

Your first composition 10

Your first customization step 11

Playing with parameters 13

Basic Media Editing 18

Crop an image 18

i
 Crop Video 19

Regions of Interest 21

Creating regions of interest 21

Using MemoryMiner 21

Edit regions of interest 23

The Soundtrack 25

Adding a soundtrack in PulpMotion Standard 25

Adding a soundtrack in PulpMotion Advanced 27

Manage your Media 30

Music Section 30

Photo Section 31

Movie Section 32

Capture Section 35

Exploring the available themes 37

Getting more themes 38

Exporting 39

Quicktime based export 39

Quicktime based shortcuts 42

iPod and AppleTV 42

iMovie 7 export 42

ii
 The Player 42

There is a life after the export... 45

Developers only... 46

Player Kit 46

Theme development Kit 46

iii
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Welcome !
PulpMotion has grown up and comes in a brand new version: version 2. This
new version is loaded with features and workflow enhancements that will
make PulpMotion even more enjoyable to use.

PulpMotion offers a unique environment on Mac OS X to create striking ani-

mations from your own media. PulpMotion lets you use your pictures, videos,
and music and turn them into amazing compositions that can be watched in
full screen and exported in a variety of formats.

PulpMotion integrates easily into the iLife ecosystem, both for importing data
(PulpMotion talks ‘natively’ to iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie projects, Garageband
projects) and exporting (iDVD, iWeb, Mail, Garageband, iPod, Apple TV and
the iPhone, of course, are all supported).

This document will walk you through the program and is intended to give you
a rich overview of the possibilities and original features that PulpMotion of-
fers. It covers both the Standard and Advanced editions of PulpMotion.

Sit back and enjoy the ride !

1
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Before we start

PulpMotion vs PulpMotion Advanced

PulpMotion comes in 2 flavors: a Standard (STD) and Advanced (ADV) version. This guide de-
scribes both versions: when dealing with a feature available in the ADV version alone, we will

add a ADV icon in the margin.

For a detailed comparison of the 2 versions, we refer to the following page on our web site:
http://www.aquafadas.com/en/pulpmotion/advanced/standardvsadvanced.php

Installing PulpMotion
If you haven’t already done so, get PulpMotion or PulpMotion Advanced from our web site’s
download page: http://www.aquafadas.com/download-video-software.html

2
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Upon download, a disk image should automatically mount on your desktop and the following
window should open in your Finder:

Simply drag the PulpMotion (or PulpMotion Advanded) icon to your Applications folder as in-
dicated to install the software.

Understanding where PulpMotion keeps its dependencies on your disk

PulpMotion (the application) will usually reside in the Applications folder.

The first time you launch PulpMotion, it will install some shared ressources in the /Users/
Shared older. This is because themes can be played outside the main application as screen-
savers or as standalone applications. In that case, some shared code needs to be accessed by
the themes in a way that is not dependent on the version of PulpMotion that is installed on
your computer. You could have PulpMotion 1.6 installed, and someone could send you a
PulpMotion 2.0 Standalone Player: both applications will coexist without problems.

Themes on the other hand, are either stored inside the Application bundle, or in the users
‘Application Support/PulpMotion/Compositions’ folder.

3
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Introduction
First, a few words to present the user interface and describe how you interact
with it.

Your first contact with PulpMotion will be the welcome screen.

It will help you to create new compositions or open recent ones. As all these actions can be
done with the “File” menu, you can choose to de-activate this panel but PulpMotion will open
on a sad empty screen…

4
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Create a New Composition

If you hit the “New” button (or File > New Composition...), you will be presented the follow-
ing dialog:

This dialog gives you access to the complete list of themes (top part) and their variants (bot-
tom). When you choose a theme, the list of variants gets updated and the Default variant is
chosen. Either double click on a Theme, or a specific variant icon to create the New document
based on that theme/variant.

Note: For each theme, there is a Credit section accessible from the above dialog that
lists the various people or companies involved in the development of the theme. The
material (images, videos, ...) that has been used with permission from their respec-
tive owners is also listed there.

5
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

The PulpMotion Interface

The main window:

There are four main regions in the main window:

• The preview area

• The Media Drop Zone, where you drop your media

• The Inspector panel, to set the media and the theme options

• The toolbar.

The Preview Area

This area shows the rendered composition in real time. It will also react in real time to all the
changes you make in the Media Drop Area or in the Settings panel.

The main element with which you can interact in this area is the preview timeline.

6
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

This timeline represents the duration of the composition (the duration in seconds is dis-
played on the right of the timeline). You can move the playhead using the mouse to move to
a specific point in time in the composition.

Vertical bars in the timeline indicate the times when a new media becomes the current media.
There will be as many vertical lines as there are media in the composition. The duration be-
tween the t=0 and the first vertical bar is the introduction duration.

The Media Drop Zone

The Drop Zone is the place where you sort the media you want to show in the composition. It
highlights the media currently shown in the preview area. You can also edit the titles under-
neath the thumbnails. Simply click on a title to make it editable. You can also double click on
a media to open it in the editor (see later).

The Inspector area

7
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

This is a versatile area that can show the Media Inspector, the Composition Settings or the
Theme Chooser. You can switch between these tab through the Toolbar.

The toolbar

The buttons on the left side of the toolbar manage the preview with the common options
(play / pause, next, previous, back to start and play in full screen). On the right hand side,
you’ve got the button to show the media manager, the three buttons to toggle the inspector
area and finally the buttons to manage the export and the conversion. This toolbar changes
when you are using a media editor.

8
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

The media manager:

The media manager lets you access your music, im-

ages and videos from the standard media repositories
on your Mac, as well as from folders.

The following sources of media are supported:

Music: iTunes, folders

Images: iPhoto libraries, iDive libraries, Photo Booth,

MemoryMiner™ (see http://www.memoryminer.com/),
folders.

The Advanced version supports Aperture and

Lightroom.

Video : iDive, iMovie, folders.

Click on the Media button to reveal the media

manager.

Drag your media from the media manager to the Media Drop Zone then enjoy your anima-
tion.

You can also double click on any thumbnail to open the media in a preview window.

9
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Creating a composition

Enough talking....let’s have you create your first composition...

Your first composition

1. Hit “New” from the welcome panel or in the “File” menu. You get the “New composi-
tion” Panel. The top half of this screen shows you all the themes. In the bottom half you can
see the variations of the selected theme. Choose a theme then a variation then hit the button
“Create”. Let’s start with “Bespoke Museum” theme.

2. Open the MediaManager and choose some photos and some videos. For each piece
or group of media, simply drag from the media manager and drop into the media drop zone.

10
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

3. You can change the order of the media by moving the media thumbnails inside the
drop zone.

4. Hit the play button or the full screen play button to render the first
version and see how it looks.

Your first customization step

So far, we’ve created a nice animation, but chances are, that all the title displayed are not the
ones we want: by default, the titles are the media file names, unless the media have been
named in either iPhoto, iMovie or some other media repository linked to PulpMotion.

11
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

So, your first step is to go through your media and add

some information

Select the Media Inspector tab .

If there is no selected media, the inspector shows you the

settings for the Introduction. In this panel, you can set the
main title of your composition and the story, a longer de-
scription of the current composition. This information is
grouped in the Introduction panel as for most of the
themes, it appears at the start of the composition.

12
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Select a media in the Media Drop Zone to edit its

properties

The inspector becomes a “media” inspector.

In this example, I’ve set a name, some notes. I did

not set the date as it came straight from iPhoto. I
didn’t set the rating....but I could have changed it.

After the name change, the new title of the media is

automatically reflected in the media drop zone.

You can move through all the media using the con-
venient keyboard shortcuts that let you select the
next or previous media.

You can open the media editor with ⌘+Enter, show

the original media in finder with Shift+⌘+i and open it with the finder with Alt+⌘+Enter.

Playing with parameters

Hit the theme settings button to make the settings panel appear. The settings are
grouped into various sections. There are common sections for all the themes and sections
specific for each theme. Let’s have an overview.

13
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Timings : This section lets you adjust the various timing parameters of the composi-
tion, such as fade duration, photo times, etc.…

You can set specific timing for the cur-

rent selected media

Wall: In this example, the sections from “Text Color” to “Text and Font” are specific to the
theme. We will see the wall section to introduce the special cell concept.

You see a drop zone in this section. You can drop a media from the media manager to cus-
tomize the theme look and feel.

14
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Movie Behavior: There are two settings for the movies. You can choose to use the natural
duration of each movie or use the media standard duration you set in Timing section. You
can also choose to hear the movie soundtrack or play it muted and let the composition
soundtrack play.

Music Timing:

It allows you to scale your composition duration to fit the soundtrack duration. In fact, it
scales up or down the media duration.

In PulpMotion Advanced, you can set a specific duration for each media. The “scale
for music” action will compute the optimal custom duration for each media to fit the
music length. In the “Music Timing” section, you can find a button to reset all the
duration to the standard duration.

Quality and Compression: this very important section contains the quality settings used in
the composition. PulpMotion lets you choose different quality levels for your media that will
decide how big (in pixels) the images can be. If an image media is larger than the maximum

15
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

media size, it will be scaled proportionally to fit inside the imposed box. The Best setting is
where the media quality is the highest: all the media are compressed to fit the graphic card
capabilities.

You can also select the Quick Preview option that will instruct PulpMotion to use the thumb-
nails of your media, for a very quick preview.

Finally, you can decide whether the movies should be compressed too. The level of compres-
sion associated with each quality setting is set in the application’s preferences panel. If you
choose Best, the movies are not compressed.

Aspect Ratio: you can constraint the

preview to a given aspect ratio that
will be used in the export. There are
presets and you can also choose a
custom aspect ratio. Some themes
(very few from version 2.0) have a
fixed ratio. For these themes, you’ve
got to choose if you want to crop theme or to use a letter box to make theme match
a different aspect ratio.

Simple vs Full settings:

The button to the right of the Composition Settings title bar lets you toggle between two dis-
play modes.

Simple Settings: only the most important settings are accessible in this mode

Full Settings: all the settings are displayed inside sections

A theme can have a very large number of settings. To be easier to handle, you can use the
simple version of the settings panel.

16
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

17
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Basic Media Editing

PulpMotion lets you do some basic media editing inside the application.

Need to crop a picture, rotate it ? No need to open Photoshop for that !

Need to adjust the IN and OUT points in a movie...no need to leave PulpMo-
tion either.

Here is how it works.

Crop an image
Double-click on a Picture in the media drop box to switch to the picture editor.
The toolbar changes to accomodate basic operations such as Rotation and Crop. Crop is
nice: click on crop to bring up the crop rectangle....adjust it to change, for example, a land-

scape format into a portrait format. Hit the close button and see the modified picture.

18
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

You can create very cool effects with crop, a Museum of people’s eyes
for example.

Cropped images are marked with a little glyph in the thumbnail.

You can also rotate your image .

Crop Video
Double click on a movie in the media drop zone to bring up the movie editor. This lets you
set the IN and OUT points of the movie. This is the section of the movie that will be used by
the composition. When exporting a composition into a standalone format, only the section
between the IN and OUT point will be exported.

All edits are displayed on the movie thumbnail using dedicated icons.

19
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

20
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Regions of Interest

How to tell stories with your pictures.

PulpMotion supports the notion of region of interests in your images. These are rectangular
areas with a title and subtitle that can be used by some themes to create visual effects
around those special areas.

Creating regions of interest

In the standard version of PulpMotion, regions of interest can only be imported from Memo-
ryMiner and from the iPhoto’09 ‘s“faces”. MemoryMiner is a digital storytelling application
published by GroupSmarts LLC (http://www.memoryminer.com/) that lets you zero in on the
stories depicted in your photos by linking them to each other based on people, places and
time.

PulpMotion talks natively to MemoryMiner via the media browser. When you choose a picture
from the MemoryMiner database and drop it into the drop zone, all the regions and associ-
ated tags from MemoryMiner flow into PulpMotion.

Using MemoryMiner
To use memoryMiner with PulpMotion, you first need to add a MemoryMiner database as a
source of images.

To do this:
• Select the Media tab in PulpMotion

• Select Photo

21
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

• Then choose ‘Add MemoryMiner..’ from the actions

menu.

• Select the database to add and click OK. The database

will appear in the list of sources.

• You can select the picture per people or place.

• You can select a picture with all its zones of interest or se-
lect a specific zone within a picture.

22
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Edit regions of interest

PulpMotion Advanced
lets you create the
zones of interest
from scratch and edit
them. The button to
create a region is in
the media inspector.
When you create one
using the “Add Zone”
button, PulpMotion
will automatically
open the image editor
to allow you to edit
your newly created
zone. Use the handles
to set the zone’s size and position.

23
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Once you’ve created your zones of interest, you can re-order them.

You can also edit their title and notes.

You can activate a selection of zones only to show inside the composition.

24
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

The Soundtrack
Give a new dimension to your composition with a cool soundtrack. PulpMo-
tion allows you to add a selection of music from iTunes or anywhere on your
Mac.

Adding a soundtrack in PulpMotion Standard

• Select the music section in the media manager.

• Drop your selection of music to the music slot.

• It will open the music track view In this view. You can choose the order of the music for
your composition.

• If you double click on a sound media, you open the music editor where you can adjust the
IN and OUT points for your music.

25
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

• As we’ve already seen, you can scale the composition to fit the soundtrack duration. This
option is in the theme settings panel.

• When the composition plays a movie, the soundtrack fades. You can set the amount of fad-
ing for each movie in media inspector panel.

26
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Adding a soundtrack in PulpMotion Advanced

PulpMotion Advanced allows you to synchronize media and soundtrack. You drop the music
in the Media Drop Zone.

If the music line is empty when you make your drop, your music fills it.

Then you can add other music tracks under specific set of media.

You can also record audio commentaries for your media. Select a media without commentary
and the record icon will appear.

If you double click on a music cell, PulpMotion opens the music editor to allow you to crop
your music.

27
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Music synchronization

There is a percent number displayed before the music name in the music cell.

It tells you how much the music is played. If this number is lower than 100% the music will be
cut before its natural end and if it is greater than 100% it will loop.

You can choose if the music should loop or if it should stop after its first loop. By default, the
music media loop and the audio commentaries don’t.

28
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

You can scale the timeline to make the music play exactly one loop. This operation changes
the media custom durations. You can choose to scale the timeline for all music and commen-
taries or just for specific one.

When you select a music cell, it make the custom timing information appear for the media
above the music.

You can also make this information appear with the timing button.

When you scale the timeline, you can see it change

the custom durations of the media. You can lock a
media you don’t want this operation to affect. Of
course, if all the media are locked, the scale timeline
action will have no degree of freedom and will do
nothing.

29
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Manage your Media

PulpMotion helps you to find your media with its inbuilt media browser. It
handle iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie projects and Garageband projects. The Ad-
vanced version also handles Aperture and Lightroom.

Music Section
In the music section, you can add
several iTunes libraries or simply
add folders.

You can also listen to the selected

music before to drop it in the Media
Drop Zone.

30
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Photo Section

The photo section allows you to look into

several iPhoto libraries. You can also add
several folders. As we’ve seen in the zone
of interest section, you can also add
MemoryMiner libraries.

The Advanced version handles

Apple Aperture and Adobe Light-
room libraries.

If you double click on an image, you can

open it in a preview window.

31
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Movie Section
The Movie Section handles iMovie.

If you double click on a movie, you open

it in a preview window.

32
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

You can switch the media manager to the full screen mode.

In this mode, you are presented with a timeline which will help you to find your me-
dia. You can zoom on it, and select the media by date.

You drop your media in the Media Drop Zone. Finally you close the full screen mode

and you get back your media in the main window bin view.

33
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

34
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Capture Section
You can capture video with the media manager. You can select separately the video source
and the audio source. PulpMotion supports capturing video from any camcorder connected
via Firewire or from the inbuilt iSight of your Mac.

35
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Le opar d Only
You can also take a picture and crop it.

36
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Exploring the available themes

PulpMotion comes with lots of themes and variants. Simply switch theme to
explore the possibilities..

Open the theme selector panel. You can see

the theme and its variations. You can change from
one theme to another safely, your theme settings
are preserved when you switch back.

Let’s imagine you’ve started to make your composi-

tion with “bespoke museum”. You’ve found a great
setting of colors for the wall which match perfectly
your media. You want to try this composition with
“factory”. You can choose the default theme or one
of its variations. Finally your bespoke settings is
better. Just select the main “bespoke museum” slot
to go back to your settings. If you select a variation
of “bespoke museum”, this variation will override
your former settings.

Each theme usually comes with lots of settings and

allows an extensive customization of the output.
Feel free to test all the settings to see the wide pos-
sibilities of each theme.

37
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Getting more themes

New themes are made available on a regular basis. Simply choose the PulpMotion > Check
for New Themes... menu to open the theme download dialog.

PulpMotion will check whether new themes or theme updates are available and download
them for you if you choose so.

While the themes that ship with the application are included in the application bundle, the
new themes or themes updates that you download will be installed in your Library/
Application Support/PulpMotion/Compositions folder.

38
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Exporting
Itʼs time to export your composition in order to share it. Several types of export are
available.

Click on the export button to reveal the export panel. The toolbar lets you
choose between all the different export types:

Quicktime based export

PulpMotion is designed to export high quality Quicktime movies.

You can use a preset or choose the size and the codec. The size is limited by the capacity of
the graphic card. You can use all the codec quicktime is able to find on your computer.

If your composition uses several movies with sound and a complex soundtrack, you can keep
all sound tracks separated in the final Quicktime movie or choose to merge all the music
tracks. It’s recommended to merge all the tracks in order to use your video in iMovie or a
video editing software.

39
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

The export dialog lets you choose the level of antialiasing and activate the anti-flickering.

These options depend on the graphic card. Some graphic cards don’t handle it.

The following images highlight the differences in output quality when antialiasing is acti-
vated.

40
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Without antialiasing

With antialiasing

Finally you can also check the motion blur op-

tion: it simulates the natural aspect of a film
footage and will add some extra blurring effect
on objets that are in motion. This option is really
time consuming but will give you very realistic
results.

41
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Advanced only:

You can fine-adjust the motion blur behavior. Because motion blur simulates the
output of a real camera with a shutter, you can adjust the shutter speed. Lower
speed will result in accentuated motion effects.
The number of pass indicates how many intermediate images are used to produce
the final image. The higher this number, the higher the quality of the final image,
but the longer the computing time.

Quicktime based shortcuts

iDVD, iWeb , GarageBand and Mail are Quicktime based export types that interact with the
various iApps using scripts. The iWeb export will create an iWeb document with the exported
video in it.

iPod and AppleTV

High quality compatible files are produced, that can be send directly to iTunes.

iMovie 7 export
Since version 1.4.5, PulpMotion lets you export your movies in a format that is compatible
with iMovie 7 (part of iLife 08). The main differences with Quicktime export are the following:

• the soundtrack of the export is flattened

• an iMovie can be optionally created and PulpMotion will place the output movie in the cor-
rect location on disk for iMovie to pick it up automatically.

The Player
This is probably the most exciting way to export data. Instead of creating a movie, we create
a standalone app that packages your media, using the quality settings you have set (lower

42
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

quality settings mean that movies and pictures are compressed. For movie compression,
open the preferences pane to see what default settings are used).

The player is not only producing small files compared to a movie, but they
are also resolution independent.

The Player Export lets you attach a message for your recipient:

Once exported, the output looks like this:

click to switch and reveal the player

Note that if the iSight was part of the

composition, it will be activated when
the viewer views the composition.

43
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

44
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

There is a life after the export...

Once a movie has been exported, we provide some conversion utilities to turn that movie into
different convenient formats: AVI, MP4, YouTube, 3G, iPod and Apple TV.

Converting a movie is a convenient way to turn a high quality master into a variety of export
formats that are best adapted to: sending by mail, sharing files with people on PCs; preparing
media for a YouTube export, preparing media for the iPod or Apple TV.

45
Getting Started with PulpMotion 2

Developers only...
Player Kit
Want to play PulpMotion compositions inside your application ?

At Aquafadas, we can provide you with a Cocoa Framework, example code and its documen-
tation that does exactly that. Contact us at pulpmotion-player@aquafadas.com.

Theme development Kit

As we write this documentation, the Theme Development Kit is nearly finished and will let
designers and developers create Quartz Composer based themes for PulpMotion. If you are
interested, get in touch à pulpmotion-sdk@aquafadas.com

46