Things I find difficult in motion

Question

Hello everyone,
I've just completed a big motion job and every time I got annoyed I made notes. Some of these maybe just me being thick. Also, don't get me wrong, I love the software.
1. Paragraph spacing
Just can't figure out a way to do this without doing multiple text.
2. Framing rotation offset
I tried spacing images out in 3d space and moving the camera between them with the Framing behaviour (like Mark S's tut - thanks Mark) You can "offset" the position of the camera but not the rotation. So the object always ends up facing the camera and you therefore you loose the 3d effect. My work around is to put the object in a group, target the group and rotate the object inside the group but this is much less intuitive and adds to the layer count.
3. Clunky keyframe editor
I've had a rant about this before. The bezier controls just go haywire sometimes.
4. No way to stop it trying to render everything in realtime
Sometimes you know exactly what you want to do in the timeline but motion has to try and render every change you make as you make it. A caps lock render disable like AE had (back in the day) would be nice.
5. Sometimes pressing the space bar when you're typing in text also causes playback.
Not sure why sometimes it does it and sometimes it doesn't.
6. Text often looks bitmapped (especially in 3d scenes) unless quality is set to Best, but an illustrator file with text embedded and "fixed resolution" unchecked looks great in Normal no matter how far you zoom in. This is the only reason I use Best quality. Best with no text elements seems fast enough but having text in your scene increases the render times by a massive amount.

Answer 1

1) Here's how you do paragraph spacing:
Type your text as you normally would. Exit out to finish creating the text object.
Double click the text object in the viewer to enter text edit or select the type tool and click in the text box.
Highlight the text for your paragraph.
In the inspector, adjust the baseline to move it further away from other paragraphs.
2) See Mark's workaround. It's brilliant, it works, and it's reminiscent of null objects in AE.
3) I HATE HATE HATE the keyframe editor in Motion. Drives me up the wall. Too bad really, because it looks better than AE's. I find it difficult to select and move keyframes as well as make fine adjustments. My workaround is to use behaviors whenever possible.
4) I don't really understand this one. Maybe explain it in terms of a scenario?
5) Yup. That's annoying. It's especially annoying if you're working on a complex animation that Motion can't playback in realtime and it starts giving you the beachball while you're trying to type. The only workaround I know of is to click in the viewer to start your text object, but then to go to the inspector and actually type in the text box THERE as opposed to typing in the viewer. If you're typing in the inspector, it won't accidentally start playback. A more drastic workaround would be to create your own keyboard shortcut set and move the play button to the 0 key on the number pad. Then you'd probably be fine.
6) This is a problem I've noticed recently myself. Actually, it created an issue where everything in my scene rendered more accurately in Normal mode except for the text which looked soft. However, changing it to best helped out my text but caused render errors in the other element of my scene. My workaround was to import text from illustrator. I hope that problem is fixed at some point.
Andy