From the course: After Effects Guru: Mastering the Timeline

How to nudge keyframes - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Guru: Mastering the Timeline

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How to nudge keyframes

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- Sometimes an element may be slightly off in the timeline. And while dragging will work, you can actually use the nudge key to move it along a frame at a time. Let's select a key frame here. And I'll hold down the Alt key on a PC or Option key on a Mac. You can now use the arrow keys to nudge the key frame one frame at a time. Left and right arrow works quite well. Release that key and use the J and K key to move between the key frames. I'll select this one. And press Alt + right arrow to nudge it so it visibly aligns with the others. If you hold the Shift key down, you'll notice that that nudges it a larger amount. Essentially what's happening here is that it's nudging it 10 frames. So, that makes it easy to see what's happening. Holding down the Shift key plus the Option or Alt key will give you a super shift. Now, the use of nudge can be quite useful, particularly with fine elements here if you want to get things precise. This will allow you to nudge a key frame so it's better placed for timing. What I generally recommend is consider zooming in to a higher level of magnification. This'll make it a lot easier as you nudge to see what's happening. Remember, consider using the J and K key to check key position. And if something feels off, just select that key frame and Alt + left and right arrow to nudge it into place. The benefit here is it makes it quite simple to check alignment. In fact, you can select multiple key frames and use that same nudge command if needed, and you see they all fall into place.

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