Keyframing effects over time

- [Instructor] When you're dealing with effects, keyframes are part of most workflows. We've already worked with them in several ways in this course, by changing the values of audio levels over time, and by changing the values of motion effects over time. Now, we're going to apply it to change the values of video effects over time. All right, I'm going to actually load my post-keyframe sequence first, so I can show you where we're headed. I'm going to play this, and then just take a look at this shot, and see if you can tell where the effects are. I'm going to just maximize.

Okay, so there was actually three effects going on. I'm going to select it, and then go to Effect Controls, and let's take a look at this. First of all, I had my motion effects, okay, so I'm just zooming in at the end, you probably saw that. Then, I had a lens flare, and as you see, it's keyframed over time, so that it travels with the light as we pan down. And then, I had a very subtle one, brightness and contrast, where at the very end, I upped the contrast to focus the product shot.

All right, so let's recreate this. I'm going to just go to my pre-keyframe sequence. You can see that right here, I have the same shot, and here it is, in its natural state. So we're just tilting down, and I did apply the keyframes to zoom in at the end, because we've already done that, all right, so we've got the tilt down, and then we already have that zoom in built in. But I want to apply two extra effects, the lens flare, and the brightness and contrast.

So I'm going to go to my Effects panel, and I'm going to type in lens flare, let's apply that. And also, brightness and contrast, okay. So, without any keyframes, you can see that my lens flare just hangs out right there, okay, so we need to move it. And so let's do that first. I'm going to come to Lens Flare, and then on Flare Brightness, I think I'm going to back it down a little bit.

Let's make it 70 percent, okay. And I haven't added any keyframes yet, so right now, it's 70 percent across the entire duration of the effect. Now, it's just a matter of moving the flare as the shot moves, and we're shooting into the light, so the flare is going to separate from the light as we move down. And so the value that we're going to keyframe is the flare center, so let's go ahead and toggle our stopwatch there, and then I'm going to just move these values around until I think I got a good center there.

Now, it's just a matter of moving, and then adding a keyframe, and changing those values. Remember, once you've added a keyframe, like we have, you don't have to add a keyframe each time. All you have to do is change the values. So I'm going to just get that flare kind of on the light, there, and keep going. And then you don't have a lens flare anymore when the light's out of the picture, so we'll get that out of there as well, and then here's where I'll keyframe brightness, and let's just back up a little bit, I'm going to go back to the last keyframe, and I'm going to add a keyframe here, and so from here to here, let's back off the brightness entirely.

So I'll go to this keyframe, and then we'll bring the brightness down to zero. So right now, we have this flare traveling with the light, and then as the light leaves the frame, we're backing off on the brightness of the flare. Let's see how this plays out. Okay, the flare is gone, and we're zooming in. All right, so you could probably tweak that a little bit, but I think it works logistically for what we're after.

Now, I'm going to come down to brightness and contrast, and I want to just up the contrast during the zoom in, just sort of focus it a little bit. This is a subtle one. So let's just up the contrast a general amount, maybe by 20, okay, and so now, everything's a little bit more contrasty, and then, right before the zoom in, which we can use our go to previous and go to next keyframe for that, I'm going to go to next keyframe, here's where the zoom in starts, so let's have the contrast start there as well.

I'm going to keyframe contrast, and then we'll go to the next keyframe, here, and then by this point, the contrast should be amplified, so I'm going to add a keyframe, and let's just bring this up to, let's try 40, and then let's just watch this, to see if that's believable. All right, not bad, I think I'm just going to back that off a tiny bit, maybe to 35.

Okay, so we've achieved our effect. As you can see, we do have quite a few keyframes going on, but they were fairly quick to apply. And we were able to use go to previous and go to next keyframes to line up effects when we needed them to. Now, let's talk about saving this out and applying it to another clip. I have a similar shot here, where we have the lights up here, and we're panning down, okay, and let's say that I want to steal my traveling lens flare from this shot, and apply it to that one, okay? I want to show you how you copy and paste effects with keyframes, because we haven't done that yet.

All right, so we know that to save this effect out, there are several ways to do this. I can do it as a preset, so I'm going to come to my lens flare only, I'm not going to worry about brightness and contrast, and then I right-click and choose Save Preset, and I'm just going to call this Lens Flare Pan Down, and then this is what I want to talk about. Scale, anchor to in, or anchor to out. Scale means that the animation will be proportional, no matter how long the clip, okay? So this clip is about 10 seconds, and this clip is about five seconds.

So proportionally, the lens flare will travel in the same way that it did here if I choose scale. So here, I'm just going to save it out as scale, okay, and then I'm going to do it again, go ahead and save the preset, and this time, I'm going to do anchor to in. So Flare Pan Down In, and anchor to in means the values are going to be computed in real time from the very beginning of the effect, okay? So everything that happens in the first, oh, five seconds or so, in terms of this lens flare, are going to happen in this preset, which, as you can tell, probably is going to be a problem, because this clip is only five seconds long.

But I'll show you here, say OK, and then we'll do it one more time, and we'll do Flare Pan Down Out. And so, as you can imagine, anchor to out is in real-time, but from the end of the effect. So I'll say OK here. Now, I'm going to go to my presets, and here's my Flare Pan Down In, Pan Down Out, and Scale. And then I'm going to come over to, I have three shots here, and so we can see how the keyframes are applied.

For scale, go ahead and apply it here, and we'll take a look in the Effect Controls panel, and you can see that it's scaled, okay, so for the first half or so of the clip, we have the lens flare going on. It still needs tweaking, it's not correct right now, we'll have to go in and change those values, but you can see that it's scaled proportionally. If I choose the in, and I look at my keyframes, you can see that it takes almost the entire clip for that animation to occur, because it's occurring in real-time from the beginning of the effect.

And on this one, I'll choose out, and then this is not going to do us much good at all, because this is going from the end of the effect, so we actually only get only one keyframe at the very end of the animation, so that's not helpful to us at all. I will show you on my post-keyframe sequence, I did do this, and I applied a scale, so proportionally to this one, I applied it to this one, and then I just tweaked some values, so that it matched with this pan down, okay, so I just moved the center of that lens flare, and then tweaked those values so that it worked for this shot.

Now I just want to say one more thing about copying and pasting effects or keyframes. Instead of doing a preset, if you just do a copy and paste attributes, I'm just going to select this clip and press Command-C, and then I'll just remove the attributes from these, so that we can do this, okay, and then I come over to this clip, and paste attributes, you can see that I can paste my lens flare, my brightness and contrast. There is no scale, anchor to in, anchor to out, but there is this checkbox up here, scale attribute times.

If you check this, it's equivalent to scale, okay, so it's going to apply it proportionally. If you uncheck it, it's equivalent to anchor to in point, all right, for this, there is no equivalent to anchor to out. So for here, I would do scale attribute times, we're just doing the lens flare, and we'll say OK, and now, if you look at the keyframes again, we're proportional, and I would just need to tweak the flare center values, in order to make it happen like this.

So by now, you should be pretty comfortable with applying keyframes in audio, video, and stills. Keep practicing, as you add multiple effects to your clips, and keyframing will come more and more natural as you continue editing.