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My project is afflicted by mysterious keyframes
I was happily (and successfully) editing a project shot with a RED camera in WS format. I’m distributing in HD, so the extra pixels on either side of the HD window give me some extra panning room. Which I need. I was happily adding Motion keyframes to shift the position left and right as needed, when suddenly things started getting funky. I’d add a new keyframe that should have shifted the image, and it didn’t shift.
After hours of futzing around, I discover the transform tool display in the program monitor, and it appears that aliens have been entering their own keyframes that are invisible to the Effects Controls window, but which are constantly screwing my efforts to use the keyframes I set in the Effects Controls window.
For example, there’s 12 seconds of video where both the X and Y elements of Position remain constant, anchored by keyframes I set. Meanwhile, the program window is happily shifting my image all over creation.
How the heck do I either push all the keyframes from my Program window to my Effects Controls window, so I can edit/delete as needed? Or how do I delete these extraneous, invisible, and insideous keyframes.
I’m using Premier Pro 7.2.2 CC. What a nightmare!
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
5 Replies
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Could it possibly be that Adobe Premiere Pro doesn’t understand how to do math when there are speed ramps in play? I just noticed that a pair of keyframes I set about 30 frames apart are ramping across the full range in the first five frames. I have a time remapping function of 695%, which, perhaps means that Premiere Pro is counting discarded frames as it tries to do the interpolation. It is almost unbelievable that they could screw this up, because the Position animation area is interpolating the changes to the position parameters exactly as I would expect. It’s just that when the actual values are passed to the transformation window, they are all wrong.
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
Check that the keyframes in the Effect Controls panel are linear and not Bezier or Continuous Bezier.
Did you drag/reposition the video in the program window at any point?
It would be helpful if you posted a screen capture with the Effect Controls panel, timeline (with video tracks expanded), and Program Monitor.
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Ivan said: Check that the keyframes in the Effect Controls panel are linear and not Bezier or Continuous Bezier.
I did make them linear, but this changed nothing. Why would Adobe offer Bezier curves that provide smooth interpolation between keyframes, but then forget to connect what the Effects window is promising (i.e., a given keyframe value at a given frame) to the actual program it’s rendering? No, they do not appear to have specifically botched Bezier curves. They have botched *all* curves.
Ivan asked: Did you drag/reposition the video in the program window at any point?
Never intentionally. I have now figured out the precise way of enabling the feature of dragging the video in the program window to create keyframes, by (1) selecting the clip into which the keyframes are to be placed, and (2) selecting the little transform widget in the Effects Controls. What a horrible piece of UI they have created! If the whole idea of WYSIWYG when you manipulate the program window, why force me to grovel the timeline in order to select the clip that happens to be visible in the Program window? And then why force me into an entirely different panel in order to enable the effect? If setting keyframes from the program window is so dangerous, why allow it at all? If it’s so logical, why not make a sensible shortcut so I don’t have to visit 3 other windows to get the job done?
But no, I never did move the window in the Program Monitor before my woes began.
Ivan suggests: It would be helpful if you posted a screen capture with the Effect Controls panel, timeline (with video tracks expanded), and Program Monitor.
I have found how to work around the problem, and how to easily reproduce it. It has nothing to do with any of these three things, at least not directly. Time remapping is such a special feature–probably implemented by a team of people who have never written anything before or since for Adobe. When Time Remapping is enabled, the keyframes in the Effects controls seem to be hopelessly misinterpreted. When I slice out video clips that were under the time remapping influence and then use Speed Control directly, it’s a pain, but I can trim the video, shift the keyframes, and everything works as it is supposed to. But when Time Remapping is in play, it appears that the frame numbers fed to the Position parameters (for example) are probably the original frame numbers of the video frames, not logical frame numbers that I or the playhead count along the timeline.
Strange.
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
Continuing my search for the answer to my question, I found this:
“You’ll need to nest the time remapped clip and then apply other effects and keyframes to that nested sequence.”
To which I say: what kind of abstraction were they smoking when they decided (1) Time Remapping was such a special function it could only be used when *nested*, and (2) why cannot Premiere Pro bother to give a warning that keyframe and time remapping are mutually exclusive functions in a single clip? (And perhaps provide a hint that nesting the clip will sufficiently separate these two time-based effects so that they will not conflict.)
Ugh.
Manifold Recording
Pittsboro, NC
https://manifoldrecording.com/ -
One can imagine what sort of math needs to be created to time remap a clip.
I’m not sure that you need to be smoking something to run into difficulty with accelerating/slowing time and run into challenges with other parts of the software that are designed to create interpolations based on linear time not being able to take their interpolation process and then have flawless recalculation based on the framerate of the clip being in constant flux.
I hear your frustration, and I think it’s probably something Adobe could have put out there a bit more plainly perhaps (maybe a warning popup in the UI…but it isn’t as if this is a basic and fundamental flaw in the system like a title blowing up the basic color corrector or something like that.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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