Can’t activate the keyframe interpolation option ease in – ease out

[Tony Brittan]

Try right clicking on one of the keyframes itself. You really should update X to 10.0.8 as well.

Tony Brittan
Island Shore Productions
Kill Devil Hills, NC

[Nikolas Bäurle]

Click on the transform button in the viewer, then you should see keyframes and the animation path. ctrl click the keyframes.

“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python

[Bret Williams]

That’s actually spatial. IOW a rounded path. Ease in and out is temporal. The speed in which it travels from and/or into a keyframe. FCP 7 and FCP X are bewilderingly useless on all keyframing fronts. It’s a crapshoot. Sometimes when you choose linear it also seems to affect ease in/out, which it should not. Sometimes it doesn’t. In 7, some spatial controls were accessed via the canvas right click, and others (temporal) were accessed with a right click in the motion tab. But they were inconsistently available. It’s still a mess in X, just a different mess. But the mess in 7 is that it seems to default to ease in/out, while leaving linear on.

[Nikolas Bäurle]

Hehe:-) I just realized I haven’t used the temporal interpolation since 10.1, I was not thinking about that.

Bret, I agree there is some weird bugs with the keyframing and the interface needs improving. Personally I feel it works very well for the style I’m currently animating, only using spatial interpolation, lately I’ve been having fun combining keyframes with compound clips and transitions. If I do need some more complex animations or I have more time I prefer using Motion anyway.

Perhaps I like FCPX keyframing since I’m comparing it to my experiences I’ve had with Avid or FCP7, animating in both always felt very tedious to me.

“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python

[Nikolas Bäurle]

This could help:

https://www.larryjordan.biz/fcpx-keyframes/

“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python

[Nikolas Bäurle]

I just came home and looked for the temporal keyframing and just realized that its not possible for the Transform parameters. Now I remember why I never used it, because it was never there, and I simply forgot about it. For opacity and other effects it works. As far as I can tell its only possible to use spatial interpolation with the Transform parameters. Reading through Larry Jordan’s blog again I realize that the explanation only deals with opacity.

“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python

[Esther Casas]

Hi Nikolas, this explains everything! so i am basically screwed with FCP X…nice! it makes this experience even better…I hate X, I am staying with the beautiful 7 until they fix all of these non-sense.

thanks to all for all your help on this matter!
Esther.

[Bret Williams]

Well 7 doesn’t really have ease in and out in most cases. So moves and keyframing tends to be very linear and harsh and pretty elementary looking. So damned if you do…

[Bret Williams]

Yeah, it appears that X just took the keyframe engine from legacy and moved things around. One of my top peeves with legacy and they didn’t address it in the slightest. All the things he points out in this article actually work very much the same in legacy. Smooth controls (ease) are in motion tab. Spatial (bezier) controls are in canvas. And just like in X, you can’t ease certain parameters. Just the ones you don’t want to like opacity. Who eases opacity?

The only change I can see if that in legacy, the default is no easing, while in X, easing exists by default. In either app you can’t change it. In X this causes a problem with basic scale and position moves, because the default easing makes a basic scale and position move appear to take an arced path. Whereas in legacy at least the default linear achieved a straight path, but a harsh stop and start. Dissolving in and out covers that though.

My workaround is to use the crop tool for scale and position moves. It’s completely linear with no easing. Results are same as scale and position with legacy.

[Nikolas Bäurle]

If I need perfect linear movement I use the Ken Burns crop as well. It never felt like a workaround to me since it does what it’s supposed to do, but now that you mentioned it I do wonder again why this isn’t possible with Xs Keyframes.

I always thought the funky scale position was something normal, I do remember having had this problem in Legacy but perhaps it was some other issue that caused a similar problem.

After I started using 10.0.1, I landed a gig cutting internal videos for Coca Cola Germany and I used the spatial curves to ad some “handheld” movement, especially to the interviews.They wanted a trashy, MTV-style edit but the production team had shot static interviews. I felt I needed more than just a camera shake. They loved what I did with it, and thats when I started liking X keyframing for this particular style.

At Promiflash I use the spatial curves to give fashion and star pics a more organic movement, as if pics are being thrown into the image or drop down, or images bouncing off of each other. The other two editors just learned X…Interesting enough the Avid editor has less problems with certain X bugs than the the FCP7 guy, who seems to be struggling based on his animations. The Avid editor doesn’t like linear, so once I showed her where the spatial curves were she was very happy, but I guess an Avid editor has no reason to be pissed at Apple:-)

“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python