Pausing a virtual camera in AE 7

[Danny Princz]

if there is nothing else moving, you can try to place your entire comp in to a new one so its the only layer.

enable time remapping and play with retiming the animation to how you like it

who is that masked man…

[Darby Edelen]

[El Pollito] “This may be a basic question, but is there a way to have the comp pause on a certain keyframe without me having to go through and re-keyframe everything? After spending a few hours putting in each keyframe and tweaking where I need the camera to go, I didn’t notice until previewing that it zips right past each picture a little too fast to see it”

The way to solve this will depend on the effect you want. If you want it to slow down while passing the keyframe you can select the keyframe and hit F9 to set the incoming and outgoing speeds of the keyframe to 0 (easy ease). If this is close to the effect you desire, but not quite right you can play with the incoming and outgoing velocities manually (usually best done while vieweing the speed graph, the button just to the left of the timeline at the top).

If you want the camera to stop for more than an instant you’ll need to make another keyframe. Simply copy the keyframes that designate the motion you want to stop and then paste them a little further down the timeline. Since these keyframes have the same values as the previous keyframes on the timeline, these properties’ values will not change between these two keyframes. The exceptions are position based keyframes which can sometimes be set to a ‘Spatial Interpolation’ other than Linear, to make sure these don’t ‘boomerang’ and cause unwanted motion you’ll need to select them, right click, choose Keyframe Interpolation and change Spatial to “Linear.”

I hope I understood what you were asking, if not: sorry for the unnecessary lesson =)

[Filip Vandueren]

You can also fake timeremapping for only the motion of the camera Layer:

create a slider Expression control on a Null layer, and create expressions for every property of your camera that’s animated (position, zoom, rotations, orientations, whatever) like this:

valueAtTime(thisComp.layer("Null 1").effect("Slider Control")("Slider"));


it’s best to enter valueAtTime(), put your cursor between the brackets, then pickwhip to the slider.

Now animate your slider to scrub through the different positions. (Probably best to use linear keyframes for it’s values so you don’t “overshoot” – see Aharon’s Tutorials on the boomerang Effect)

This can get a bit confusing though when you decide to tweak your position keyframes after remapping…

[El Pollito]

Everyone – thanks so much for all of the help!!! I really appreciate all of the suggestions. One thing I love about Adobe products is that there are always several different ways to accomplish what you are trying to do.
At this point it seemed easiest to just pre-comp and time remap as was suggested by rendernyc. Staring at all of those keyframes in the original was making my head swim. I appreciate the other suggestions though, Filip and wuzelwazel. I’ll file those away for other projects. Thanks again, everyone!

-El Pollito