All About Keyframes & The Graph Editor - An Adobe After Effects Tutorial

hey everybody this is Evan Abrams and today we're gonna talk about graphs whoa hold on let me help you contain your excitement I did say graphs it might not seem that interesting but I can assure you at the end of this tutorial you're gonna know a lot more about making interesting motion using After Effects for all your motion graphics motion graph motion graphics there's a pun in here somewhere but I don't know about it so let's look at some examples of what I'm actually talking about so we can actually learn some things raps so this is a graph and it's going to help us understand how a property changes over time we're gonna use a simple property that has only one vector and that's gonna be gross the scale but when we start talking about the graph editor and how values change over time it's important to know that there are many ways that can happen using keyframes I know the keyframes look simple but there's about four or five types of keyframes and that's gonna talk about them really briefly right now because they're important gross now the first keyframe is called the hold keyframe and this holds a value then holds the value and continues holding the value a hold keyframe means do nothing until you see another keyframe run this next one is called the linear keyframe and you can see on the graph up there that it is a bunch of lines going between the keyframes so value 0 straight up to 100 straight down to 0 if you're familiar with algebra you'll know that this is a linear slope is what you're looking at so let's go back to the algebra class and a little go with that runners another form is called the easy ease and you can see how this is coming just like an easy lazy curve basically it means you're easing out of a keyframe or easing into a keyframe so the value is is kind of slowing as it gets there ground this next one is the continuous Bezier and there's two types of bezzie ace and a Bezier a if you've used something like illustrator or Photoshop or something to work with paths or even in here to work with paths you know that AB se a is it's a type of curve that's it's influenced by two points sort of like a line that comes off of a point and that in flow the curvature so when you look at the curve of this you can see there's been a Bezier applied to all the points where they're pointing is different than with the EZ so this is a different way of bending and manipulating the points so this one's continuous and the other one is called the auto Bezier that's about it let's get into what these look like on the graph but first I want you to see them all side by sides you can really compare around how the difference in the motion graph or the time graph or whatever you want call this graph well the differences in these things graph actually means to how this one property is moving all of these things have the same keyframe 0 100 0 all spaced apart the same number of frames but I've altered the graph of each of them so they all behave and look differently so hopefully that helps as we get into it it's time to turn this bad boy over to after-effects and actually make something cool okay so inside After Effects just so you don't freak out on me we're only looking at two windows because I only care about two windows one of them is of course the timeline and the other one is the viewing window so so these two windows are you can look at the project window or whatever you want but I'd only care about them and you shouldn't care about them either for this tutorial so here's the thing I'm gonna try to help you make it's like a dot the dot does some crazy stuff more dots you know whatever but the thing that we're gonna be working on is getting familiar with the graph editor so the first thing to do is figure out how to open it and use it so if you want to access the graph editor it's right here click this and then it changes your timeline which has time on the top and then the layers here it changes that to be time on the top and then values here it's gonna make a graph this is a look at some content real quick in the graph you notice it was empty and that's really scary because now everything is gone but really all the animation that I'm doing is happening in this layer and everything in here is either a black or white circle that is moving or rotating or whatever if I select all of these and just real quick pull up the graph editor for those you can see there is a heap of lines going on and I know it's a different way to look at information and it might actually be a very uncomfortable way for you to look at information but you know rest assured this is actually a really good way especially with something like this to really understand you know what's happening where are well so you know hopefully it helps to have that information here and I'm just gonna show you really briefly how to navigate this thing right now you're seeing a lot of information and that is because I have not only show selected properties but show animated properties checked if you have selected properties only it means you have to go in and you have to select a property in order to see it but if you have show animated properties then by selecting everything you get to see all the animated properties of those layers so that can be helpful you can change what kind of graph right now I just use auto select what graph is important but you can look at just values you can look just a value graph or you can look at a speed graph which shows the speed of everything two different types of information depending on what you want to edit so just keep that in mind as well we're gonna work with the values just because it's a little bit of an easier thing to wrap your head around this is about selecting things using a transform box to alter points maybe it gives it to you maybe it doesn't but if you're only interested in altering the arms then we'll do that the snap is for having things snap to other things like other points etc this here is about zooming so when you resize it'll automatically go to the height of the things makes it easy to look at and this button here fit all graphs to view that can be helpful then there's also Fitz selection to view which can be helpful as well navigating in this view is difficult and it only gets better with practice so just keep in mind these handy tools when you select a point you get whole new options right over here you can edit that keyframe with all this stuff which is the same as if you right-click and go you know edit or you can go keyframe interpolation whatever it's the same as doing that you can also convert the keyframe to a hold keyframe or a linear keyframe or Auto bezzie a or an easy ease or other kinds of easy ease just with these buttons these are like quick buttons for you and that pretty much wraps up it to edit things you just select them grab some handles wiggle them around so hopefully that makes sense for you and what I'm gonna do now is just kind of remember what I'm looking at here and we're gonna try to make that over from scratch so first thing to do new composition that looks like a fine type of composition settings boom and we're gonna go new first stuff comes up a new solid make it white and this will be like our background for everything then we're gonna go we're gonna get an object to play around with so let's get an ellipse let's make the first one black okay and we won't kind of change the size to a uniform so pull open the ellipse content to lips lips path change the size on link though is 500 by 500 to us and we only want to care about the scale so hit s pull up the scale and let's get ready to keyframe so it's gonna push ahead a little bit and then start keyframing so click the stopwatch keyframe on set the first value at I guess zero it's good go ahead a little bit maybe make it a hundred go ahead the same amount and back down to zero right now these are linear keyframes that is really not exciting you know I'm gonna level with you that's actually really boring so remember linear is boring just snaps this graph to the view and you can see the line line me yawn yawn it's what I'm saying so select all of those let's easy eat them let's try that first and see how that that does for us Wow all right well that's mildly better so the easy ease as you can see it goes eases into and out of the points that's alright but speed it up so click the point grab the handle here hold down shift to keep it on the line and then pull it out you can only go as far with the handle as there are keyframes around you so it kind of it bottoms out right because this keyframe can only influence at a maximum when this keyframe starts so that's kind of one of the rules how did that do do that fix anything for us well yeah that kind of did actually because it goes so that's kind of good I'm into that let's just tighten this up maybe a little bit and tighten this one down as well just so it accelerates up a little bit more that's good I'm happy with that also let's select these all and copy em and then pasted him right on the end boom so one down - that's pretty good it's like throwing something up in the air you know and in fact let's select these two things down here and let's let's make those in Auto bezzie a so Auto Basia is that it will define for me what the best fit is yeah that's a way better fit so kind of helps us out to get this good bounce pounds now I don't know if you want to add some more bounces do whatever you want I don't really care because we need to move on and make another element of some kind so we could have this thing come up and explode into a bunch of colors or whatever you want to do but for my purposes I believe I will just take these two things copy those paste them I'm gonna edit this value here up to 250 so I double clicked on it and I just typed in 250 mm yay and Wow so it's getting big in fact that's definitely way too big so I'm gonna go here I'm gonna dial that down a little bit to around there and also I'm gonna change its motion I'm gonna drag this up to be like that Wow so let it so we bounce bounce and explode so boom that's good and its value will continue on forever because now it's time to make something else so I kind of like this curve and I like the way this curve is going so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna duplicate this layer and then you know I'll select the scale on its layer and the only points I'm really interested in are the last two those are the good points and so I don't actually need the layer to continue on anymore before that and so really the life of this layer is starting here and getting big and I'm gonna change it from black to white because I want contrast and I'm gonna shift it ahead so that it creates this sort of ring so burn bow kind of thing so as soon as what I would like is for as soon as this first black layer when it gets to like its maximum as bigger that's gonna get then we shoot off another one big big kind of thing and I think that'll do for that big big and I might want to actually make those closer and in fact let's use the graph editor to decide where we want that overlap to be so you can see here on the two things that we've got going on we look at them both and we can see the point at which this layer will surpass this one so in fact let me just do that let me just help it surpass that a little bit and in fact let's just alter this thing down I need to do kind of like this this can probably come in a little bit more this editor this version of the editor makes being able to edit values a lot more interesting so what does this look like well I think it kind of comes out of nowhere it also takes a bit of trial and error so yeah that's pretty good yeah see what that did Wow okay so far so good let's go here and actually let's cut off this bottom layer that's where it can end I do that by holding down alt and then hitting the end square brackets or you can just come back here and cumbersome ly do that but so what do we got we've got a thing that comes up comes up again comes up big and then is has this ring come out and now one of the cool things that I liked was a bunch of them coming out one after another so let's duplicate this lets offset it a little bit let's change his fill to black cool so what does that do burn burn around next let's offset a little bit we're wearing okay so let's try to keep this gravy train rolling let's have a whole whack of these come out I'm just gonna go duplicate duplicate duplicate duplicate duplicate I'm gonna I got one two three four five six and we want every other one to be white so this one that one and this one fill move it to white okay and let's offset these you know a little bit so let's offset this I'm gonna hold down alt hit page down hold this one two maybe and then 1 2 3 and then 1 2 3 4 and then 1 2 3 4 5 and then you know just the top 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 well kind of interesting and interesting so that's how you can create a pretty interesting ripple wave effect coming out of this thing is by taking the same curve and offsetting it and you can look into the motion graph and you can see why this works that here they kind of come up and they lightly overlap each other and you look at the curve you can see how as just as one is slowing down another one is coming up to supplant it so I mean the big thing is you don't want to get too carried away and wanna get too wacky with everything but in general this is pretty simple way to make that happen for yourself so hopefully this teaches you how to make some of what I did the rest of it though I will say right away that you should do it by experimentation we've only touched on a tiny part of how to use the graph editor you know we could have gone in here grab these points and said you know what give me a speed graph instead let's have some real fun with this when you come in here and you just grab these points and you just start monkeying around with them you know in no particular semblance of order or rhyme or reason just grab some points and go easy world over you know the results are not always pretty obviously the graph editor is a great way to be able to get into the nuances of motion when you look at this like even if you look at all the key frame values this doesn't really tell you much about what you've even created you know like here's a key frame there's a key frame what are all these key frames doing you don't really know I mean you have some idea by staring and looking at them and playing it back but when you look in here and you can see visually what you're doing it gives you a way better appreciation for what is that what does the key frame mean what does it even mean to key frame what's happening with these values over time and it really gives you a nuanced appreciation appreciation for that before I finish this thing off who wants to see me make it look cool we can totally do that let's do that right now what I did in the original example is we've got actually a bunch of stuff going on so up at the top you know without looking at this or the vignette or anything there is an adjustment layer up there that's applying a fast blur and a curves to some stuff under that there's an adjustment layer that has been set to screen and is applying a ramp of some kind forget rid of that everything looks kind of normal keep going down there's that pre-comp there's a ramp down here on this adjustment layer and then finally a white solid so you can see there's actually a lot of things that go into making the look as it was and you know all in they are all interesting and necessary so I encourage you to play around check that stuff out enjoy the time graph hopefully this gives you a new tool in your toolbox that you can pull out and do cool stuff with I know it's not as interesting as making a specific thing but I hope this this actually helps you out to make other things so I'm in vinay room so if you have any questions about how to use the graph editor just drop me a line I'll try to help you out your best bet is to put a comment in here and I'll try to get to them when I can and if there's anything more complicated you no need to know you can always send me an email but yeah thanks for watching you know comment like enjoy and I'll see you around the internet

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 182,694

Keywords: after, effects, adobe, cs6, how, to, howto, tips, tricks, lessons, aftereffects, visual, fx, software, help, instructions, tutorials, editing, Adobe After Effects (Software), How-to (Conference Subject), keyframes, key, frame, frames, graph, editor, time, edit, window, scale, bouncing, ball, waves, motion, graphics, mo, easy, ease, hold, linear, Tutorial

Id: pTGViL5v8cA

Length: 19min 50sec (1190 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2012