-
Help with Ease In/Ease Out / Smooth Motion
I’m in the process of completing a historical documentary and have run into a problem. The project calls for a LOT of photos. And, as usual, most of the pix have different types of moves attached to them. I’m trying to get the moves to start and stop on the photos with an “ease in” and/or “ease out” effect. Normally, I’d do this in AE, but due to time constraints (not to mention the volume of pix), I’d rather get the gist of it down in FCP.
I’ve tried both the “Ease In/Ease Out” and “Smooth” keyframe commands. Smooth seems to work best. If there’s a center position change during the move however, the photo appears to slightly “float” up and down during the duration of the move – especially when starting and stopping. Problem is, I don’t want it to float… I just want it to move smoothly from point A to point B.
Is there a way to gradually start and then gradually stop movement on an object (such as a photo), without having this floating effect?
Thanks.
Tim Walton
-
1 Reply
-
You have to set easing for center animation in the Canvas. Smoothing only applies to keyframes in keyframe graphs, and you can apply it to scale, rotation, crop, distort, time remapping, filters, etc. There should be no float effect on a simple move if done properly.
Two problems occur, one when you have to make a very large move. This is because scale and center animation work in different ways and have different motion rates, one is linear, the other is logarithmic, and because there is no exponential scaling in FCP to compensate for this. The other problem occurs when you need to make an animation ease into a move, ease out of a move to a stop, hold, and then ease into another move. This cannot be done in FCP properly because of the way the software has been implemented. It’s been a failure of motion control in FCP since v1, and that something so basic to good motion control has still not been improved in v5 is pretty poor, but that’s for another day and another discussion.
There are third party solutions to do good, complex motion control. CGM online has a roll/scroll title filter (which was at one time incorporated into FCP in v3 but subsequently removed, another unfortunate development in the “progress” of FCP). You can do good smooth motions as described above with this tool. Lyric software has Pan/Zoom Pro which works well as a plugin to FCP and also gives good motion control. A standalone product called Moving Picture also works very well.
All the best,
Tom
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy” DVDs
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up