From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

Fixed and elastic keyframes - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

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Fixed and elastic keyframes

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- The graph view in the effect editor gives you access to a few advanced controls for your keyframes. And, I'd like to take a look now at the fixed and elastic keyframes option. By default, your keyframes are elastic. And that means, if you change the duration of your clip, the timings of those keyframes will adjust accordingly. If you like, you can imagine them as measuring time as a percentage, rather than as hours, minutes, seconds in frames. For example, if I de-select this clip by clicking on the time code bar on the top of the timeline, and go into my trim mode and trim this clip shorter, let's take it about halfway back, and then, select the clip, go back into the effect editor, let's line up my playhead properly, notice that all of the keyframes remain on the clip. They're now playing over about half the duration. But their relative positions, within the new duration of the clip, are a match. It might be what you want, it might not be what you want. Up at the top of the effect editor, I have three, if you like, master keyframes for this effect. And if you select any of these keyframes, you're choosing all of the keyframes that exist in all parameters throughout the effect. It's a little bit like clicking on the keyframe in the preview monitor. I'm going to hold the control key here on Windows. This is the command key on Macro S. I'm going to select all of these keyframes. And now, having selected them, I'm going to right-click and I've got a menu full of additional options. There are some pretty obvious options here. I can add a keyframe at this point in time, or I can delete an existing keyframe. Remember, you can select a keyframe and press the delete key to remove it, too. You can also add, start, and end keyframes, which is pretty useful, because very often you will want a keyframe at the beginning and end of your clip. There's also a great option to remove redundant keyframes. These are keyframes that you have in your clip, but where they actually have the setting they would have anywhere at that point, based on the other keyframes in the clip, so they're really just cluttering up your view and potentially interfering with your animations. So, you can remove those. The option I'm interested in right now is further down the list. Elastic or fixed. By default, your clips will have elastic keyframes. I'm going to change these selected keyframes to fixed. And then, I'm going to go back to my timeline window and I'm going to trim this clip back to its original duration. Then, I'll reposition my playhead, select the clip, and go back into effect mode. And immediately, you can see what's happened. These size keyframes that I added earlier have stayed exactly where they were in time. These, of course, are ideal if you've created an animation that's intended to be an intro animation. Perhaps you've got an item flying into the screen, and you don't want the timing of that to change. Or, perhaps you've got keyframes at the end of the clip, intended as an outro, and you'd have to reposition the keyframes after trimming the clip. But, the timing would still be correct. Again, by default, your keyframes are going to be elastic. But, knowing that you can specify that some or all of the keyframes should be fixed gives you even more control over the timing of your effects.

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