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Time Remaping – Ramp Down -> Hold Frame -> Ramp Up – How?
Hello,
First post…I think. I am sure I had an account years ago, but for the life of me I can’t the log on details…anyway:
Long time graphics person, short time video, so I am on a steep learning curve and thanks to sites like this it’s been a relatively painless experience so far. Until today.
I have a video that I have edited in Prem but I am now working on in AE for all the bells and whistles. Both programs are CS 5.5. The media is a vanilla 32bit uncompressed AVI in an 8bit 1920×1080 25fps (PAL HD basically) AE project.
I don’t believe any of the above will have any impact on what I am doing, although the frame rate may do.
Anyway, all I am after doing is to “simply” slow down a piece of footage (admittedly in a tight window of 2 seconds), hold the frame for about 10 seconds and then speed the footage back up to normal play speed. The crucial part here is the video must STOP for about 10 seconds and I only have about 1 or 2 seconds of footage either side of this in which to do my graceful speed up/slow down.
It’s not a complex problem, but one I seem to be having a stupid amount of problems with. I have watched and read tens of guides, but I can’t get it to work, so I was wondering if someone here could give me a definitive guide on how to do it?
I am getting the following problems, they aren’t happening at the same time but I am getting them randomly from my experiments:
1) Doing a both a straight speed change and ramped the time/video after the pause is accelerated. I know why this would be and I think I have the right workflow to stop it, but obviously I don’t. Sometimes it’s slightly too fast and not massively noticeable but other times it’s obviously fast.
2) When I try and ramp the edges (using bezier curves) of the acceleration I get the following issues (again not all at the same time)
a) The 10 seconds hold on the speed graph becomes a giant elongated inverted bell curve putting the play head in reverse.
b) The play back speed will quickly ramp up/go into reverse just before or after the slow down curve.
c) The acceleration inverted bell curve seems to look right, it even seems to be at a steady speed slower than 100%, but it’s not stopped, it’s running around 10% speed.
I think that’s about it. They all seem like they are simple issues, but when AE usually goes on one with things like this I can get around it by using nulls (I am thinking camera movements), but obviously I am stuck with the graph views on this one. Unless I am missing a trick?
Thanks in advance.
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7 Replies
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It sounds like you almost have it. What I would do is apply a time remap to the clip this puts a key frame at the beginning and the end. Then place a key frame at the frame that you want to stop. copy that key frame (the stopping point) and paste it one frame after the original. Take both the copied stopped key frame and the last key frame that was at the end and drag them over 10 seconds. Then make the original stopped key frame a hold key frame to avoid any drifting. Then you can start adjusting the curves to make a gradual time slow down. You will probably have to drag your first and last key frames out a little to make sure it does not speed up right before it slows down. I hope that helps a little. I’m not the best at explanations.
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Hi Paul
— had a similar problem yesterday positioning an item……….
… and ( as far as I can see ) the problem is that the AE motion controls / bezier curves are, quite frankly, not very good ….
….and sometimes I just have to give up and find a way round it – and think you could do the same if that suits…
For instance in your case it sounds possible to do this in two layers one slowing down and the other speeding up with transparency controls to swap from one clip to the other
This is effectively how I solved my own animation ‘ issue’ yesterday.
… an hour trying to get things to work is far too long …. the temptation is to ‘stick with it’ because you think you will know the answer ‘next time’, but it does not seem to work like that ! ! !I know the controls are complicated and I know I need to do more homework on them but I still think that at times they actually do not work properly.
Anyone interested in improving these controls would do well to look at the way the animation curves work in Flint / Flame – very easy to use, very responsive and very subtle.
BTW if anyone knows a brilliant tutorial on how to set animation curves in AE I would be very interested just in case I havent already seen it ! !
————– all the best ——-chris —
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Thanks for the replies chaps.
I followed your suggestion and so far through my testing it hasn’t gone wrong yet 😀
I don’t think you have suggested anything I haven’t done, I just maybe haven’t done it all at the same time.
So I am off now to carry on with the fiddling.
Cheers.
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Ok, I spoke to soon.
Right I am ok up to this point:
But everything I try after I am back to the old problems.
How would you progress from here to make it a smooth slow down and speed up, but only over two seconds?
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The timeline curves can be a little wonkie sometimes. I was able to work this effect out. Like I stated before set up time remap. Make sure that when you move the key over for the pause that you move over the final key the same amount, ie 10 seconds, if you don’t move the final key over as well the remainder of your video will be sped up. What I did next was move over 10 frames after the point that you want it to start moving again and set another key for time remap. Now you can take that key and move it 2 seconds from the point that the video starts moving again. You should then have a timeline that looks like timeline.jpg Then you can move the keys in that little step up and down respectively to make the timeline look like timeline2.jpg this should give you a slow speed up from the pause. You would then just reverse that to slow it down before the pause. The timeline that I posted are of the speed graphs. I hope this helps some. I don’t know if there is a better way to do it, but this is the way that I know.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
― Albert Einstein -
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
IT WORKS!
Thank you so much, I can’t believe I finally got it working! 😀
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Any time. I’m glad you got it working.
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