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Chapter 2 Creating and Managing Projects 191
Managing Projects
When you work on a project in Motion, it’s important to be organized. This includes
keeping careful track of your project files, saving often, and maintaining regular
backups. The idea is to make sure that nothing gets accidentally misplaced or deleted,
and that you don’t lose work by losing your valuable digital resources. Motion also
autosaves projects that can be retrieved at any time.
Saving Projects
As with any application, it’s a wise practice to save early and often as you work on your
project. This way, you don’t lose work due to unforeseen circumstances such as a
blackout occurring just as you were about to finish your latest animated masterpiece.
Besides preserving your work for future use, Motion’s save commands can be used in
other ways to manage the development of your project. For example, if you’re happy
with your current composition, but you want to create a variation of what you’ve done,
you can use the Save As command to save a copy of the current project. You can then
freely alter this duplicate, leaving your original project alone in case you don’t like your
changes.
You can also use the Save As command as an archival tool, saving individually named
copies of your project periodically over the course of its creation. This serves two
purposes. First, it ensures that you have duplicates of your project file, protecting you
from inadvertently misplacing your only copy and losing days of work. Second, it also
gives you a way to go back to previous versions of your composition, in the event that
you or your client want to make a change based on an earlier point in that project’s
development.
To save a project:
1 Choose File > Save (or press Command-S).
If the project has not already been saved, the Save As dialog appears.
2 Type a name into the Save As field, choose a location on your hard drive to save the
file, then click Save.
Note: If the project has already been saved, the project file is simply updated.