Autopilot: motion design made from your logo
The projects page has a second way in now. Studio is still the library, made your own a field at a time. Autopilot starts from the other end: your logo, your colours and what your channel is about, and it hands back three finished intros to choose from.
Four steps, and the logo is used as it is
Autopilot asks for a brand first. Import your YouTube channel or type its name, upload your logo, and say how it should feel — up to three words out of ten, from calm to bold. It also asks what kind of channel it is, from 21 genres, and guesses from the channel's own topics when you import it; the guess is shown and can be changed.
The logo is used whole and never redrawn. Colours are worked out from it unless you set them by hand, so a red mark on white gets a film built around red and white rather than a palette from somewhere else. A logo exported with empty space around it is drawn cropped to the mark itself, so it fills its place instead of arriving small in the middle of its own margin. The file you uploaded is never changed.
Then you pick a length — five, ten or fifteen seconds — how energetic it should be, and whether it should carry sound design on its beats. Generate concepts makes three.
Films built from blocks, not a template recoloured
Each concept is a short film assembled from motion blocks in seven acts: a background, how the words move, the transition into the mark, how the mark lands, an accent on the hit, how the name arrives, and the camera. There are 282 blocks across those acts today — solid colour fields and waves, light that looks photographed, character and pixel treatments, turns and flips in depth among them.
Rules decide which blocks belong together. A background that lives through the words is never covered by a flood of colour, a camera shake only comes with a landing hard enough to earn it, and the words are always gone before the mark arrives. The channel's genre leans the choice toward a style — cinematic, energetic, technical, playful or editorial — and a seed makes every channel's three films its own.
Every film ends on the mark exactly as it was drawn and holds there, with your name and handle under it unless you ask for the mark alone.
Sixteen sounds that land on the beat
Autopilot's films can carry sound: a whoosh on each word, a riser into the hit, an impact as the mark lands. They come from a new set of sixteen Motion FX sounds made for this — synthesised here and released under CC0 — and each one is placed so its loudest moment falls on the frame it belongs to rather than wherever the file happens to start.
The same sixteen are in the sound browser for any project, under Motion FX.
An ordinary project in Studio
Choosing a concept opens it in Studio like any other project. The film is one layer, and its blocks are named in the inspector: swap the background, the landing or the words, change the colours, or ask for a new variation of the same film. Everything else about the project — sound, other layers, the export — works the way it always has.
Exporting one costs what exporting any project costs, once per project.