Copy animation keyframes to a layer - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] Another very useful thing that you can do with keyframe animations is copy them from one layer to another layer. For example, say that you have applied a movement and a layer style animation to a layer, and then you realize that you actually needed to apply the same two animations, the movement and the style transition, to a different layer. Well, let's see how that works. So continuing on with the same file that we've been working with, let's just press the play button and revisit what's happening. So, the ellipse traverses across the top of the screen. It gets brighter due to the layer style that I had applied inside and then the text comes on. So, what I want to do is I want to copy the keyframes that are associated with that ellipse shape layer, and I want to copy them onto a brand new layer. So, down here in the timeline panel, here's the ellipse track, and here are its keyframes. So, I'm gonna select the keyframes by clicking on one and then Command clicking on Mac or Control clicking on Windows on the others to select them. Next, I'm going to right click on one of those selected keyframes, doesn't matter which one. Right click and choose copy. So, now I've copied that keyframe information. Now, let's add a new layer to attach them to. I'm gonna come down to the custom shape tool in the tool panel. White is my foreground color and up in the options bar, it is set to create a new shape layer. Just gonna turn off the first ellipse here, and I'm going to click up at the top layer here to make that active. And, I'm just choosing this custom shape right here. Let's drag a shape out. I'll hold the shift key to constrain the aspect ratio. All right, there it is. Let's just position this roughly where it needs to be here. Now, to paste the keyframes that I've already copied, I need to prepare this shape layer. To prepare it to receive the new keyframes, I just have to add a keyframe. So, let me open up the keyframe panel here, next to that layer in the timeline panel. I'm just gonna click at the start here and add a vector mask position keyframe. That's all I'm gonna do. Now, to paste down the copied keyframes, I'm just gonna right click on that new keyframe and choose paste. You can see that the four keyframes I copied from the other layer have come in now. So, let's move this layer down and get it in the right position for the effect to work. I'm gonna drag it down underneath the waterfall. However, it's come in as being clipped to the ellipse, so let me option click on the border between the new shape and the ellipse layer to unclip it. Now I need to option click on the border between it and the waterfall, and the same thing for the curves layer, to reclip those. All right, that should work now. Let's see how it works. There it comes. It's lighter, and the text comes in. So, that worked out very well. Now, you can also copy a layer into another file, and any keyframes that are associated with that layer will come along for the ride. Let's check that out. I'm gonna press F twice on the keyboard to take myself out of full screen mode. I'm gonna click on the shape one layer here, and I'm just gonna drag it over onto the other file. Actually, let me come over to this file here and just double check it first. I wanna make sure that this glacier view layer is the active layer. And come back here, I get my move tool, and I'm going to drag that layer up to the name tab of the other file, and then when the other file appears, I will drop it in. And if we look at this here in the timeline panel, we can open this up, and we can see that those keyframes are already there. So, let's set this up. Just turn on the waterfall layer and we'll clip the waterfall to the new shape by option clicking between the two. There we go. And, I think I just need to reposition this text layer here. Let's add a fade onto the beginning of that text layer. And have it positioned where it needs to be. That's where it needs to come in. All right, let's set it back to the beginning and play. So, you can see the motion comes through. The fading to white comes through, and it all works out really well. The ability to copy keyframes from one layer to another is a big time saver, especially for those situations when you need to apply the same keyframe effect or a similar effect to a different element in the same file or in another project file.