From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

Fixed and elastic keyframes - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

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Fixed and elastic keyframes

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- [Instructor] The graph view in the Effect Editor, gives you access to a few advanced controls for your key frames. And I'd like to take a look now at the Fixed and Elastic key frames option. By default, your key frames are elastic, and that means if you change the duration of your clip, the timings of those key frames will adjust accordingly. If you like you can imagine them as measuring time as a percentage, rather than as hours, minutes, seconds and frames. For example, if I de-select this clip, by clicking on the time code bar at the top of the timeline, and go into my trim mode and trim this clip shorter, let's take it about half way back and then select the clip, go back into the Effect Editor, let's line up my play head properly. Notice that all of the key frames remain on the clip. They're now playing over about half the duration, but they're relative positions within the new duration of the clip are a match. And that might be what you want, it might not be what you want. Up at the top of the Effect Editor, I have three, if you like master key frames for this effect, and if you select any of these key frames, you're choosing all of the key frames that exist in all parameters throughout the effect. It's a little bit like clicking on the key frame in the preview monitor. I'm going to hold the Control key here on Windows, this is the Command key on Mac OS, and I'm going to select all of these key frames. And now having selected them, I'm going to right click and I've got a menu full of additional options. There is some pretty obvious options here I can add a key frame at this point in time or I can delete an existing key frame. Remember you can select a key frame and press the Delete key to remove it too. You can also add, start and end key frames, which is pretty useful because very often you will want a key frame at the beginning and end of your clip. There's also a great option to remove redundant key frames. These are key frames that you have in your clip but where they actually have the setting they would have anywhere at that point based on the other key frames in the clip so they're really just cluttering up your view and potentially interfering with your animation so you can remove those. The option I'm interested in right now is further down the list, elastic or fixed. By default, your clips will have elastic key frames. I'm going to change these selected key frames to fixed. And then, I'm going to go back to my timeline window, and I'm going to trim this clip back to its original duration. Then I'll reposition my playhead, select the clip and go back into Effect mode. And immediately you can see what's happened. These size key frames that I added earlier, have stayed exactly where they were in time. These of course are ideal if you've created an animation that's intended to be an intro animation. Perhaps you've got an item flying into the screen, and you don't want the timing of that to change, or perhaps you've got key frames at the end of the clip intended as an outro, and you'd have to reposition the key frames after trimming the clip, but the timing would still be correct. Again, by default, your key frames are going to be elastic, but knowing that you can specify that some or all of the key frames should be fixed, gives you even more control over the timing of your effects.

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