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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Adjusting Key Frames in Bulk?

  • Adjusting Key Frames in Bulk?

    Posted by Paxton Means on May 17, 2018 at 1:21 am

    Hello! I’ve been looking through the forums and haven’t been able to find quite what I’m looking for and was hoping someone may be able to point me in the right direction.

    I’m building out template letters using a path and the stroke effect to revel each letter as if it was “written”, key framing the start and end of the stroke for the length of the reveal. Each letter is being written simultaneously.

    I’m looking for a method to be able to adjust the speed or key frames of the stroke across all letters proportionately, retaining variation in the time it takes to revel the letters (some letters take x amount of frames to complete while others take y, z, etc). I’d like to be able to set a base speed with the key frames and globally adjust faster or slower by percentages in some manner.

    The use case for me is if there’s a need for slower/faster revel due to creative needs or client feedback I’d like to be able to make the change globally and not need to reset all 26+ characters key frames, only for them to like it at a different speed.

    I’ve looked into pre-comping the completed wording and time warping, would that be the best answer? I’m concerned about variable frame rates in the composition.

    Any help is appreciated!

    Michael Szalapski replied 8 years, 4 months ago 4 Members · 6 Replies
  • 6 Replies
  • Walter Soyka

    May 17, 2018 at 9:55 am

    Pre-comping and time-remapping is one way. What is your concern specifically with “variable frame rates in the composition?” Do you have footage in there?

    Manipulating the keyframes directly is another way. If you multi-select all the keyframes you want to adjust together, you can hold Alt while dragging the first or last selected keyframe. Ae will stretch or squish the timing of the other selected keyframes.

    Walter Soyka
    Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
    Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
    @keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

  • Steve Bentley

    May 17, 2018 at 3:21 pm

    With the precomping and time remapping solution that Walter suggests, the great thing is that because the animation is being done by AE, there are no missing frames or “mask” positions. Even though you may not have a actual keyframe that covers half of an “O” lets say, when you remap the time in the outer comp AE will interpolate this time dilation properly between the keyframes you do have. Its kind of the ultimate way to stretch or shrink time because there are never duplicate frames like you get when you just do a time stretch on running footage.

  • Paxton Means

    May 17, 2018 at 10:45 pm

    Thanks for the suggestions, I’ve made the precomps and added timewarp, but as feared the animation is now slower, but blocky and unsmooth.

    It’s slowing down the time between the frames but is not adjusting the stroke effect’s distance between frames. For instance if I had a 10 frame animation reveling the image, Timewarped it’s now 20 frames long, but they are the same 10 frames over the course of 20, each frame is just doubled.

  • Paxton Means

    May 17, 2018 at 10:51 pm

    Thanks for the response!

    I’m creating overlays that will be rendered and placed over canned footage. I need to keep to 30fps to avoid misaligned timings. I tried Timewarp and as explained on the other comment it is just extending the time on each frame instead of altering the animation length. I was hoping to be able to map to a slider expression to be able to adjust the animation speed globally, which won’t really help if I need to adjust the keyframes for each letter depending on feedback.

  • Steve Bentley

    May 18, 2018 at 8:39 pm

    You may need to turn on the continually rasterise button (the sun icon) on the precomp layer to make it calculate every frame of the outer comp and not just the keyframes of the inner comp.

  • Michael Szalapski

    May 18, 2018 at 9:26 pm

    Timewarp isn’t what was suggested. Try Time Remapping instead.

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