Non-smoothed Keyframes on 'Transform' Parameters?

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Non-smoothed Keyframes on 'Transform' Parameters?

Hi guys, this is driving me absolutely insane:

I'm working on some screencast videos and just want to achieve a rather simple effect: a simple, slow zoom to a part of the canvas, then after a period of time, a slow zoom back out to return to 100%. Check out Apple's new iTunes video on this page to see *exactly* the effect I'm talking about:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/whats-new/

Now, I've been using FCPX for six months now and overall I absolutely love it, but I haven't done much keyframing or canvas/layer manipulation up until now. I thought this would be easy, but it seems that every time I keyframe an object's position and scale (or anything under the 'Transform' tab, for that matter) FCPX renders the movement with an S-curve.

I read some threads by people with similar problems and understand that with certain keyframes (seemingly only those where the motion path is visible in the viewer when 'Transform' is enabled?) you are able to toggle between linear/smooth. Some others suggested that keyframing the position and anchor point is a workaround, but I get the same effect when doing this this.

Basically, I just can't animate a non eased/curved zoom and pan. Is there a way to stop keyframes of 'Transform' properties from doing this? I really don't want to have to take all my screencast videos, bring them into After Effects, apply my motion effects, export them again and bring the final videos back into FCPX.

Any help on this would be *greatly* appreciated.

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), iOS 6.0.1, 16GB RAM

Posted on Nov 29, 2012 2:50 PM

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Answer 1

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

151,010 points

Nov 29, 2012 3:46 PM in response to AidanH

Animate the crop function to do what you want.

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Answer 2

Nov 29, 2012 3:49 PM in response to AidanH

You need to use third-party effects to do this.

I've made a few free ones that might help:

Alex4D Grow-Shrink

This effect animates between two scales. You can choose the centre point and choose the 'curvature' of the scaling. You can leave the scale as an S-curve because the position of the clip doesn't move, so you don't have to worry about the scaling up clip moving off the edge of the screen.

You'll need to apply the effect to the clip twice - one for the zoom in, one for the zoom out. The zoom in version can be applied with a 'Finish Scaling Early' value, the zoom out version with a value for 'Start Scaling Late'

In general, you might also find the following effects useful for better animation control:

Smooth Move Moves, scales and rotates between two points with curve controls for each

Curves A set of six effects that give animation curve control for position, scale, rotation and trim controls

@alex4d

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Answer 3

Jan 30, 2013 4:27 AM in response to AidanH

Might be a bit late, but I had to work this out myself too...

I had two trasforms moving grahics around, one was fine, the other had a curious 'bounce' to it. This was caused by the path of the postition transform being set to S-Curve. Here's what I had to do to fix it (simply deleteing and re-adding the keyframes didn't work)

Select the element with the keyframes and hit the transform button in the lower left hand corner of the viewer, you should see the red animation curve / line in the viewer (you light need to zoom out a bit to see the ends if your 'move' is a large one).

Right click on the ends and you'll get a context menu where you can check / select to select linear or smooth (the S-Curve) for the keyframe changes.

Hope that helps!

John

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