From the course: After Effects CC 2021 Essential Training: Editors and Post

Working with keyframes - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects CC 2021 Essential Training: Editors and Post

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Working with keyframes

- [Instructor] Setting keyframes to create an animation inside of After Effects is just as straightforward as it is in Premiere. However, you have a greater degree of freedom and ability to manipulate those keyframes in After Effects. Adjusting the keyframes of more than one property across more than one layer at a time is a big difference between After Effects and Premiere. Here, we'll build a little title reveal and look how we can easily scale, reverse, and re-time those keyframes in the timeline. So this composition has four layers and a background layer. And when I preview, you'll see that three of those layers come in from the bottom and move off to the top. They also go from black and white into color. And this last layer over here on the right-hand side, doesn't move at all. So that's what we're going to animate. We're also going to re-time some of the color effects so that they time out better. And we'll also introduce our logo at the end so that we can have a little reveal. So let's take a look at the keyframes that we have here. I'm going to go ahead and stop this. And first of all, you'll notice that I'm working at quarter resolution here instead of full, just so that we can preview things a little bit faster. So I'll nudge that back down to a quarter. And I'm also going to take my work area and limit it to frame 125. Even though the actual duration of the entire comp is 300, when I do my previews, it will just preview from frame zero to 125. And then I'm also going to zoom in to my composition a little bit. So select layers one through four, and let's come over here to animation, reveal properties with keyframes, that keyboard shortcut U. And you'll see that I have position. I have hue and saturation as an effect, and all these available keyframes that we defined earlier. This is something that we want to look at and just only alter the position keyframes at the moment. So while I have all these keyframes here, I can certainly elect to show just the position parameter. And so let's go ahead and twirl up all of our layers. And instead of hitting U on the keyboard, let's hit P instead. P for position, we'll bring up the position properties of each of those selected layers and any associated keyframes that are along with it. So you see layer one over here on the far right doesn't have any keyframes. Let's go ahead and add some keyframes to make 'em match and move along with his buddies. So I'm going to click and drag my current time indicator here and holding down shift, as I do, will snap to whatever's underneath it. So any keyframes or the in or out points of a layer, it'll snap to those. So I'm snapping here. Let's go ahead and insert a keyframe. That's where this layer's going to end up. I'm going to work backwards here. And down at frame zero, let's go ahead and click and drag this down, holding down shift to constrain that motion just to the up and down. And over here, I can certainly insert a brand new keyframe over here, or I can undo and copy this one keyframe. Cmd + C, Cmd + V, since those are the same values. And now when we move back down here, we can animate this off, moving up forward. So we manually keyframed this in place to kind of match the other layers. However, there is one other way that we can do this, that we could have done it. If we go ahead and turn off our stopwatch there, we have all the position movement from all these other layers here. The only difference is that this guy is over on the far right. And so we can make use of the previous animation that we built. Let's go ahead and select the entire position for layer two, and that will select all the keyframes for us. Let's Cmd + C to copy, and let's rewind our current time indicator down to the beginning and with our position parameters selected on layer one, Cmd + V to paste. And you'll notice that layer one is now following the exact same motions as layer two. And so we just need to offset this so that it occupies this empty space here. And so how do we do that? Well, we can park over on any of these keyframes. Go ahead and shift drag so you can target frame 68 precisely. And with the current time indicator over that keyframe, we can come over here to our position parameter and just click and drag to slide the value over. And you'll notice the entire motion path. All these other keyframes will keep their proportions and all that relative information in place. Alternately, you can move around in the composition window. You can actually pick and click and drag the keyframe from here as well and move the entire motion path that way too. So I'll just undo that. We'll reframe here up to 100%. And once we preview, we see that. All right, we have all of our position in place. Let's go ahead and re-time our hue and saturation effects so that it starts to animate on once we land here at frame 23. So I'm going to shift select layers one through four, come over here, or hit U on the keyboard to get all those keyframes. I'm going to nudge up my timeline a little bit so we can see a little bit more of our keyframes. And because I have all these keyframes here, I just want to isolate the hue and saturation. And I don't need to see the position. So I can filter those out by simply option shift, clicking the position. And you'll see that it filters those out and leaves only the hue and saturation keyframes. And this is one of the greatest things about After Effects is that you can now select across multiple layers and multiple parameters, all these different keyframes. And so because this is now a selection, I can click and drag on a keyframe and move it into place. Alternately, I can nudge these keyframes frame by frame. Just hold down option and left arrow or right arrow on the keyboard. And that will nudge the keyframes into place. And holding down shift and option along with the right and left arrows will move it in 10 degree increments. So at frame 23, there we are. We've nudged these keyframes into place and they all come full color and they move out. I think one other thing we can do to kind of help finesse this animation is not have these video layers all move in from the same spot. So rather than having them all move in from the bottom and work the way out through the top, let's alternate some of these. Like this one, layer four and layer two. Okay, let's go ahead and twirl all this up. And what we'll do instead, is select layer two and layer four. We'll command click on layer four to multi-select that. Push P on keyboard to reveal those position keyframes, and let's get this going in the opposite direction. Let's reverse this animation. So to reverse an animation, you might think, okay, let's take this one and move it all the way to the beginning. Let's move this front one and move it all the way to the back. Let's undo 'cause there's definitely an easier way to do that. So with my position parameter selected, all these keyframes get selected. And now what I can do is right-click on any one of those keyframes, go down to keyframe assistant, time reverse keyframes. And so now you see at the beginning, the second layer is moving up from the top and working its way towards the bottom. So let's go ahead and nudge these two keyframes to keep that in place. We'll option left arrow to I guess, twice there to kind of match the original animation. And then we'll do the same thing for layer four. Select all those keyframes and time reverse keyframes. And select these two guys, and we'll just nudge that into place. So now we've got two coming up from the top, two coming from the bottom. We can finesse this further by just not having it slam into place. You'll notice here that for these position keyframes, all these layers just abruptly stop. And then again, abruptly start as they take off. We can add some easing to these keyframes. So let's select layers one through four once more, we'll hit P on the keyboard. And these are all linear keyframes. And so they just kind of slam into place. Let's introduce easing by selecting all these keyframes for this position. And we'll right-click and again, under keyframe assistant, let's select easy ease in. And so instead of a harsh, sudden stop, now we get this nice smooth motion where the layers are easing into place. So let's go ahead and do the same for these keyframes here, so that they gradually take off. So right-click, keyframe assistant, easy ease out. You notice those icons change up altogether. And now when we preview our composition, now there's moving off and easing in and out of their positions. Okay, I think we can do just a couple more things here. Let's go ahead and select these three layers, their position, and let's offset the timing of this a little bit, so that we can just have them all come in, settle, and then one by one, we can have these guys begin to take off. So option and shift, let's go ahead and right arrow. And that will move it in 10 frame increments. And I'll select the bottom two now, layers three and four, and do the same thing. Shift and option, plus the right arrow on the keyboard. We'll offset that 10 frames. And then this last one, we'll do 10 frames as well. So now when we preview, they all settle into place and then one by one, the layers take off. So we've just staggered the outro timing of our animation here. Okay lastly, all we need to do is add in our logo. So let's go ahead and drag our glass logo from our footage folder. And I'm going to drag that underneath layer four to make it the brand new layer five. And when we preview, we see that the logo's already there. We obviously don't want that timing to start there. We actually want it to be over maybe right in here. Just this last layer here starts to move off screen. So with my layer five selected, I'm going to left bracket on the keyboard and that will take the end point of layer five and move it to the current time indicator. And so now, let's go ahead and preview again. Layers come into place, move out. And there's our Glassworks logo. Go ahead and preview that a little bit longer. Maybe move down to frame 200. Once you select that and so we can see it a little bit more clearly. Let's go ahead and bring this guy out. Okay, I think that's looking pretty good. So here, we saw how to adjust keyframes in a variety of ways and how After Effects gives us great control over how to manipulate multiple keyframes across multiple parameters all at once.

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