subject: Working With Keyframes In Adobe After Effects [print this page] Do not concern! This text is here to help you with an vital half of When Effects' workflow: the keyframes within the composition window. This is what all animation in the software is based around. The aim of this guide is concentrated on creating you perceive the concept of keyframes instead of how to technically use them.
Regular, recent-school animation, is finished by individually making every frame by hand. As an example: if you needed a ball to bounce over screen, the animator would draw every frame - in the air, slightly nearer to the ground, even more close to the bottom, really shut to the bottom and hitting the ground. With fashionable motion graphics this point consuming process is not needed, thanks to the surprise that's keyframes. A keyframe is simply what it feels like: a frame that's key to the animation.
To keep the ball metaphor going, an animator operating with keyframes would place a keyframe when the ball is at the high of the drop, and one at the bottom. The software then calculates what happens in between the different states, referred to as tweening. Using this technique, we have a tendency to will animate position, scale, rotation, opacity, blur levels - basically something that can have a numerical value. You'll be able to even animate distortion of clips to make funny facial expressions for example.
You'll conjointly use easing, a method when the pc calculates the speed of amendment between the keyframes. For example, if you animate a automotive beginning and driving away, you would need the animation to seem realistic in that the automotive slowly accelerates. So as to do this, you place one keyframe at the beginning of the driving stretch and one at the end, and apply the easing. Now the car will begin off slow, and eventually reach it's driving velocity. Combine this with keyframe-animated wheels and - voil? - it took you seconds to try and do what would have taken hours years ago.
Thus the concept of keyframes makes use of the computational skills of When Effects. Rather than animating frame-by-frame, you'll now animate keyframe-by-keyframe and let the pc do the rest of the work!
