5 Free Autumn Tree PNGs

Autumn comes around and everyone comes scrambling first of all, for their spice pumpkin latte. A few weeks later, the fall decorations get dug out of the attic, and then, finally, a sudden panic sets in. The fall play is here and you need to create the programs. The harvest offering at church is here and you need an autumn background for the live production. The party at your friends house needs invites and you go running to the nearest Dollar Store for cheap cards. As Kevin O’Leary would say on Shark Tank, “stop the madness.”  Those are all great things that require graphics and sometimes, getting those graphics can be very hard to get without an expensive subscription plan. So I have tried to make it slightly easier in 2 ways. First, their are lots of free motion backgrounds that are readily available for download. Second, below are 5 high resolution images that already come with built in alpha channels. For those that may not know how cool that it is, that basically means that you will not have to waste time getting rid of the white background that accompany so many stock images. Simply download the image and drop it on top of your background graphic and done!

Deciding When To Throw Away Footage

The location is scouted. The appointments are made and the talent is on the way. The sun slowly rises revealing a picture-perfect landscape as the shot list starts getting shorter.  At the end of the day, not everything filmed is going to be useable. Factors such as focus, composition, brightness and detail all play a part in deciding if a shot will make its way to a final feature. And unless you are working on a larger budget project with a team of people, each tasked with a particular duty to perform, it’s going to be challenging to be sure all the shots are turning out the way they were intended.

Read more

How to Change Virtual Backgrounds in Zoom

It has taken us absolutely no time at all to familiarize ourselves with the world of online video calls. It seems that there are dozens of platforms that instantly popped up over night when addressing communication problems due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For the more tech save people, this wasn’t a hard adaptation, but merely took a few minutes to download the Zoom software and install it. For others, this should their worlds to their core and it’s an ongoing nightmare.

To get to the point, if you are doing zoom calls and are getting tired of the same old backdrop, whether that be in your parents basement, a white kitchen wall, or the crooked picture in your bedroom, changing up the background can be a nice breathe of fresh air. Jason Johnston has done a good job at walking someone through the steps. He made one critical error and that was selecting backgrounds from Pixabay, instead of Motionbolt.com, however, it was certainly good enough to be a huge help to those that need it.

Motion Backgrounds used in Live Show – Nailtabuous Eps. 2

It’s not every day that you create something and then see it pop up on a concert stage, a rock band backdrop, a church production, or even a live youtube show. We know it happens all the time due to the thousands of downloads each week, but we’re talking people in over 100 countries downloading this media. We rarely see the final products. I want to thank Ocean Deep LLC for sending me a link to their live Youtube production in which they used the 6 Free Christmas Motion Backgrounds in their production.

There are multiple interesting motion backgrounds used in the production, most of which are not from www.motionbolt.com, but if you scroll to about 7:51, and 11:23, you can see how the free Christmas motion backgrounds were used in a green-screen sort of way. Very nice and festive!! I also appreciate the show out from Ocean Deep LLC for adding my URL in the production.

As always, I love seeing how the motion backgrounds are used around the world in thousands of live productions and video each year and if you have used one and would like to share it with me, I would highly appreciate it!!!

 

Love, Kennedy, The Movie

In the movie by T.C. Christensen, Love, Kennedy, Kennedy Hansen is a funny, loving child, she inexplicably begins to fall ill. It takes years for the diagnosis: Juvenile Batten Disease – an extremely rare, terrible and terminal prognosis. There is no cure for Batten Disease, and after living only 16 years, Kennedy leaves behind a great legacy of love and friendship. But her story doesn’t end at her death. That’s when the miracles really begin.

In the trailer for that movie, and dynamic powerful and colorful motion background was used to introduce some title slides in the most impactful way. Comprised of 2 particle systems and a bright orange light burst, this motion background creates energy, has a sleek look to it, and perfectly delivers its message in accordance with the sound track.

This motion background was so well done that it was a challenge to recreate it. In my attempt to do so, I used two different particle systems, a light burst, some blurry adjustment layers and a couple gradient backdrops. In honor of this movie, enjoy this free motion background, Love, Kennedy.

Download this free motion background here:

How To Get A Moving Background On Power Point

There are hundreds of different ways motion backgrounds can be used, but one of the most common is in power point presentations. So, this begs the question, how exactly does a motion background get added to a power point presentation. The process is simple and with just a few clicks, it can be done with ease.

To start the process, open Microsoft Power Point and add a new slide.

Next, navigate over to the menu and click on Video. A drop down menu with two options will appear.

Select the “Video From my PC” option. This will open a dialogue box from where the video can be navigated to, in order to be selected.

The motion background is inherently added to the presentation in the top left corner of the slide, but it doesn’t cover the whole slide.

To fix this, click the video and grab the bottom right corner. The video will scale proportionately and with the left mouse button held down, drag the video until it fills the whole slide.

Essentially, that is all there is to adding a motion background to a power point presentation, but there are also a few best practices to keep in mind.

  1. If you want to set the video to auto play when the slide is clicked on, be sure to check the setting of the video by right-clicking the video slide. It can be set to manual or automatic.
  2. If you are going to have text on top of your animated background, be sure to choose a text color that compliments not only the background, but is also visible and easy to read.
  3. Finally, be sure to save your motion background in the same folder as your powerpoint presentation to be sure it stays connected. If you upload your presentation and email without attaching the video, it will have a broken connection. Zip up both the presentation and all the video files by selecting them all and then sending them to a new zip folder.

 

Why Is Utilizing Video Important?

There was a time not too long ago when people asked each other, “what’s an email address, and who really needs one.”  As technology progressed, those questions have been slowly revolutionizing our daily lives in ways that quite dramatic. Similar to the communication aspect of digital media, video has been in the forefront of being a number one provider of both communication and entertainment. It is impossible to deny the fact that video creates powerful emotion and can be done so in a very short time.

Youtube Video Usage Statistics

We are living in the age of video, not just technology. The amount of video being consumed each day is more than the video that been recorded in all of history, or at least since Philo T. Pharnsworth invented the first few little scanlines on a screen. Take a look at these statistic below to get in idea of just how much content is being watching and consumed each day. Youtube grasped the importance of video very early on, and now it has premiered as the second largest search engine in the world.

With video heading in the direction it is, it is also important to be working with the right video. If you are a media producer and need more lyric video backgrounds, you will find exactly what you are looking for in our motion background library collection. With nearly 1100 different motion backgrounds available, there is no excuse to not get on board producing good videos. Let us help you with your projects and help you leave maximum impact for your cause.

Are Subtle Movements The New Trend?

Early Years Of Worship Motion Backgrounds

For almost two decades, maybe even longer for those people that jumped on the video bandwagon shortly after their compact projector bulbs burned out, motion backgrounds have steadily become more complex, dynamic, and creative. From light bursting from the top, then all sides, then the middle, to particles going one way, then another way, then swirling, then came the whole geometric shape transition with its triangles, squares, reverse angles, and hexagons, animated loops have been reworked to the point to which people have nearly seen it all.  If there is one industry that has unlimited options, yet somehow manages to make everything look similar in one way or another, it would be the motion background world.

For many years, as technology was starting to emerge, new features were added to computers, cameras, and visual presentations, prompting the the content creators to start incorporating this into their presentation and productions. If a new feature was added, it must be used. Thus the say, “more is always better” became the trend in the early 2000’s especially in the church and live production arena. At the same time,  there was attention span concerns and by using flashy graphics, it was one way to keep the audience engaged a little loner before eventually drifting out. So why, after all these years, are certain trends starting to emerge?

Evolving Trends in Worship Motion Backgrounds

Well, it could be because some of the backgrounds were hurting peoples eyes when staring at them too long, or it could be because some content creators used no self control with their .5 second particle burst and you felt like you were traveling through space at mach 5 on a Sunday morning during worship. Either way, video background started to evolve into more refined background that were less distracting. Today, the focus has slowly shifted back to the message of the content, and not so much the delivery of the content. While both are important, if people tune out the message before full digesting it, you’ve already lost them.

Many of the new backgrounds that are being used feature very subtle motion, with fewer particles, less flashing light bursts, almost to the point to where it’s hard to tell what is actually moving. For some backgrounds, it’s a still picture with a small beam of light that is shining from a lantern, or some other vessel that could output light. Abstract backgrounds haven’t completely been driven of the map in the worship arena, but may have taken a back seat to some of the more organic and real backgrounds. Slow moving glitter through water, high fps clips of colorful smoke slowed down to where it barely can tell its moving. Fractal Noise makes an entrance again due to its ability to change the setting through a slow evolutionary process. Now that is evolution that actually does exist.

In summary, yes, there are certainly uses for all types of motion backgrounds today. Concerts and commercials still need the flashy up-tempo looks and sports games still use them to overlay their graphics. But the interesting thing is that the old phrase “less is more” is once again coming back and sometime, the backgrounds that move people’s emotions the most, are the ones that barely move.