Closing and Opening a Project

Now that you've seen the finished composite and know what you're aiming for, let's close the project so we can rebuild it.

There are three ways to do almost everything in Motion, including close a project. You can use a menu, a button, or a keyboard shortcut. In this exercise, we'll use the menu method.

Like most software applications, Motion offers a series of menus across the top of the screen that you can access at any time by clicking the menu name.

1.	Locate the File menu toward the upper left of your screen.
2.	Click once on the File menu to open it.
3.	Select Close from the File menu to close the current project. NOTE The shorthand for steps that involve menus will be written as Choose File > Close. In other words, File is the title of the menu, and Close is the selection within that menu.

The Canvas window containing the current project closes.

NOTE

If you made any changes to the project file that was open, you will see a dialog box asking you if you want to save changes. For now, click the Don't Save button to close the dialog box.

Now let's practice the menu method again to open the project 1-1 Graphics start.

1.	Choose File > Open to open a project on your computer. An Open window appears.
2.	Inside your MOTION_INTRO Book Files folder, navigate to the Lesson_01 folder and select 1-1 Graphics start. The entire path to your project file is APTS_MOTION_INTRO > MOTION_INTRO Book Files > Lesson_01 > 1-1 Graphics start.
3.	Click the Open button at the lower right of the Open window to open the selected project.

1-1 Graphics start opens in the Canvas window.