How to group objects in a lower thirds title to allow movement together (PPCC17)

[David Borget Longshanks]

I've created a lower thirds title with a rectangle background, text and animation. Now I'd like to use the motion-position control to move them off screen and then on, so that the title, rectangle and animation all move together in sync and without changing position relative to each other.

Trouble is, I cannot select all three objects. Not by Ctrl + cursor or Shift + cursor or by selecting more than one layer at a time in Essential Graphics.

Suggestions?

[Meg The Dog]

Once you have your elements in position in the Essential Graphics Panel, keeping the graphics clip on the timeline selected, switch to the Effects Controls Pane and do your motion animation there.

MtD

[David Borget Longshanks]

I have the three elements in perfect position on the bottom left of the screen. My goal is to move them all together off-screen to the left, and then motion animate them to slide together as a unit on-screen from the left.

The problem is that I cannot grab all three at the same time. I have to move the rectangle, the text and the animation all separately. This is the case even though the graphic clip on the timeline is selected.

[David Borget Longshanks · Accepted solution]

Here's how I solved the problem. Instead of manually moving all elements off the left side of the screen and then creating a rightward movement with motion-position in Effect Controls, I simply selected the slide video transition and placed it at the front and tail end of the graphic clip. It applies to all elements in the clip and moves them simultaneously and smoothly. Thanks, Meg the Dog. You got me thinking about dealing with the clip as a whole.

[metallums18]

Thank you for this working working around/solution.   

However I would suggest this gets pushed into a need for some kind of correction to this Ess Graphics panel.   With the essential graphics panel, we can now create multiple elements nested within one graphic track and supposedly there is some kind of relational position settings.  You can choose relative to the stage or to a specific element.  However it's very difficult to understand how these can be animated together or individually as they don't act as expected by their naming, where the registration points are, or much of anything.  Certainly the expectation should be that once we have them in place within the track that editing effects controls for that track should effect everything within that track the same.   At bare minimum they could place a check box option for us users within the panel options for a graphic to "maintain positioning as one item in effects controls".   Otherwise I'm going to start avoiding all this by keeping every single element in a separate graphic track.  "Lower third" grouped items would go back to being a nested sequence of their own.

I see similar issues with level of Text formatting options in the panel, the unknown suggested workflow of using the "toggle animation for" option of each item in the panel.  I suppose I have to get a new how-to for this app to explain the oddities.