Keyframing Footage For No Stress Animations & Cool Effects

No After Effects, No Problem! (maybe)

Keyframing and Keying and completely different things.

Don’t let the jargon confuse you.

BowTiedTamarin | Video & Audio 🧙 @BowTiedTamarin

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I touched on keying last week but today I want to get into keyframing. Keying is a compositing in a zillion YouTube videos, but here’s a fairly clear, to the point video that shows you the difference between a few important points.

The other detail this video hits on are Easing curves. Linear motion looks weird and jarring to the eye because that’s generally not how things move around in real life. Everything takes time to speed up and slow down. Usually. If I want to animate something crashing into something else, we want the stop to be sudden and abrupt.

If you did the bouncing ball guide in After Effects a few weeks ago you had to work with this a bit. A ball will naturally hang in the air at its apex and then accelerate downward. Generally this is what separates really clean looking animation from something that feels unpolished and clunky.

Animating assets the easy way