Turning off temporal keyframe smoothing?

[Bill Davis]

There’s a big discussion of this just below.

Essentially, the engineers built a ton of new capabilities into the keyframe generator in X with extremely sophisticated “ease in – ease out” and motion smoothing capabilities – which makes the default actions look tons more elegant and modern (IMO) – BUT – when you want to defeat all the fancy new smoothing and ease in/out stuff, and go back to the simple un-smoothed keyframe to keyframe to keyframe basic process of the past – it’s a definitely a hassle.

The video clip that Charlie referenced in the thread below outlines a work-around that let’s you place and delete keyframes next to ones where you want to “kill” the smoothing behaviors – but it’s fair to say that in adding the new capabilities, the engineers on X made it MORE difficult to get simple actions done without learning more new stuff.

It’s the now classic X “we giveth cool new stuff – and we taketh away the way you USED to do things – so it’s time to re-school yourself”

In lots and lots of the “hidden corners” of the software, you’ll see this. Something that looks simple – but had a lot of new thinking and capabilities – but requires building new habits and maybe even new thinking.

It’s a lot of why a lot of people HATE X – right up until their brain “gets” what it’s doing – then they love the new capabilities that the new thinking makes possible.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

(Whoops – I thought I was in “Or Not” – this is Techniques – I should have just answered the question rather than discussing philosophy. My bad. But still, look for Charlies’ post bove in the Keyframing JPGs thread linking the useful YouTube video about defeating “eased keyframes” – sorry for my confusion)

[Nikolas Bäurle]

James

I was involved in a discussion last night about this on the FCPx or Not Forum.

You need to actually ctrl+click on each keyframe to do this.

If you only use the inspector to set keyframes you should get a linear animation by default. If you set your keyframes in the timeline or in the viewer it should give you curves.

The problem I’m having in the viewer currently is that for some reason when I have two exact same keyframes and ctrl+click them it keeps on showing me the menu for the first one, even though I can grab the curve handles for each keyframe without a problem. In my buggy case if I want to change the second one I need to move it, change the curve, and change the parameters back, Charlie’s way also works for this. I’ve never had this problem in Motion.

Nik

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

[James Culbertson]

Ah, thanks Nik. Now I understand the difference. And thanks Bill for getting me a fix for what was already done.

[Sjon Ueckert]

The whole problem could be solved with a keyframe graph editor; you could adjust them individually to any level linear or a number of bezier type curves.