EVERY Setting Explained 🌟 Anim Curves In-Depth • Free Visualization Macro • DaVinci Resolve Fusion

so have you tried working with anim curves and found that they just didn't work the way you thought they would or did you have trouble getting the desired outcome using anim curves in your animations well i certainly ran into those problems and i decided to take a really hard look at am curves and try to sort out all those details so let's take a look how's it going everybody as i mentioned when i first looked at anim curves i got mixed results i plugged in numbers that i thought made sense and they just didn't work the way i thought they should work so i took a deep look at anime curves and i decided to really work through each one of the settings and try to gain a full understanding of how they work and that's what i'm going to cover in today's video i'm covering a lot of content today if you want to skip ahead to a certain point there are links in the video description to chapter markers so you can jump ahead to whatever part of the content you are most interested in so what are anim curves well atom curves are a tool available to us in fusion that allow us to animate our compositions without the use of keyframes you can use keyframes with anim curves but one of the main benefits is you don't have to do that you do get some other benefits as well if you don't use the keyframes the main one being that you can scale the length of that composition without having to do anything else to it you can just simply cut it into pieces if you need to or you can rescale that composition and everything with the anim curves will adapt automatically now there are some trade-offs and i'll cover those as well but you do have that capability if you just use anim curves out of the box without the use of keyframes and in this video series i'm going to cover three main topics the first one being an in-depth look at atom curves and looking at all the various settings and what those settings do when you apply them to your anim curve the second video i'm going to cover is how you can do intro and outro animations with your anim curves because there is a setting that says mirror and the automatic assumption is if we set up our animation and check the mirror checkbox everything should work in reverse as an outro animation but that's not the case at all and then the third video in the series about atom curves i'm going to talk about the differences in using anim curves with no keyframes and compare and contrast that to using traditional keyframes and a keyframe stretcher tool to adapt the length of that animation to different durations and to help out with this process i've put together a macro just jump over the buy me a coffee page and grab that free of charge or throw me a coffee if you want i definitely want to give a shout out to jrtv his video about anim curves was definitely a big part of my inspiration for creating this preset and trying to visualize what exactly is happening with these anime curves we'll jump into that macro right now and take a look at what it gives us that will help illustrate some of these concepts so the first thing you'll notice is that you do have access to all 10 of the anim curves and all of the general settings available in an anim curve and you can sort of use this as a sandbox or a test bed to play around with and see what these settings do the first thing i want to do is play through this animation so that you can see all of the curves at the same time and what those look like so i'm going to go ahead and hit play on this now understand that when you actually use anim curves you can only use one curve at a time or to be more specific you can ease in your animation with one curve and ease out your animation with another curve but you wouldn't end up with a scenario like we see in this example where all of these curves are happening at the same time i just did this for illustration purposes so that you can have a clear look at what the shape of each of these curves look like and then how these different settings apply to the different curves and to keep things simple as we're talking through these examples i'm just going to use two of the curves and let me just point out if you decide to download this macro the way you use it is if you want to change any of the settings you just go back to the beginning of the composition and then click the restart button and that will restart the trails based on whatever settings you have changed over in the inspector by the way let me stop just a second and say thanks so much for stopping to check out this video my name is ron chanall and my goal here on this channel is to help you become a better video editor and motion graphics creator by providing tips techniques tools and assets all related to davinci resolve so if that's the kind of content you want please be sure to subscribe hit that notification bell and enable all notifications so you'll be alerted whenever i post a new video let's get back to the anim curves so i'm going to disable all but two of the curves just so that we can focus on exactly what's going on in the anim curves [Music] so i'm going to click restart to reset our trails and then we'll hit play on this so we can see what these two curves plot out to so now i have only enabled the expo curve and the elastic curve and i picked these two specifically because expo is a common curve that seems to work really well for a lot of different animation use cases and i picked elastic because it actually goes above the top of the scale graph and then dips back down and then goes back up and then settles back down and that will be really good for illustrating the clip high setting that's available to us in the anim curves so let's take a look at some of the basic settings inside the preset and then we'll jump over to an actual simple animation example and we'll set up the animation using these various settings that we've touched on in the preset so to keep things simple in these examples i am not using an ease in curve that has a drastic effect on the shape of that animation curve so again for simplicity and just so that you can see the entire shape of that curve i'm going to leave the ease in animation off in the preset as we look at these different basic settings that apply to the anim curves to further simplify this i'm going to actually turn off the expo curve so that we have just the elastic curve showing and now let's take a look at the mirror and invert settings so we can understand what those do so you'll notice that the curve starts at 0 and then goes up to one or in this case above one because of the shape of the curve and then kind of oscillates around one and then settles back down if we click the invert checkbox invert simply flips that curve upside down so instead of starting at zero it starts at one and goes in the opposite direction so i'm going to reset that and then let's take a look at what happens if we use the mirror checkbox so you can see by using the mirror checkbox that animation is split in half and half of the time is used for the animation in and then the animation curve is flipped as a mirror image and the second half of the animation uses that mirror image of the animation curve to finish out the animation with anime curves it's important to understand most of your settings are going to be relative to the length of your clip or your composition and the specific element of your composition that you were animating so for example if we look at the time scale on this macro zero represents the beginning of the composition and one represents the end of the composition so whether that composition is one second long or 30 seconds long or an hour long zero is the beginning and one is the end so you can also think about it as zero is zero percent of the weight through the composition and one is a hundred percent of the way through the composition i'm gonna enable clip high and as you can see it literally clips everything that goes above the 1.0 value not all of the curves go above 1.0 but that's why i've chosen the elastic curve for this example because it does go above 1.0 and enabling clip high will cut the top off of that curve and not allow it to go beyond the 1.0 level clip low does the same thing but it's used whenever values get below zero on any of your anim curves so i'll stop that animation and i will uncheck clip high and then let's take a look at how the scale works scale is relative to the attribute that you are animating so if you're animating an attribute that goes from zero to one then a scale of one means that that full amount of animation will be executed across whatever time scale you've selected so if we're animating from left to right and our value available is zero to one and we have a scale of one that means that whatever we're animating would go from fully left to fully right based on a scale of one so if we only wanted that to go halfway across the screen for example and we set the scale to 0.5 then whatever attribute we're animating is only going to get through half of the scale available to it so let's restart the trails and see what that does and as you can see the shape of the curve stays exactly the same and the duration of the animation is exactly the same but now we're only getting half as much movement or half of the scale of movement compared to when the scale is 1.0 and then i'm going to reset our scale to 1.0 and then let's talk briefly about offset the offset value directly relates to the scale that you have specified so let's just put in for example a value of 0.25 for our offset so you can see with an offset of 0.25 the shape of our curve looks exactly the same and the duration of the animation or the duration of that curve is exactly the same but now it starts 25 higher than it did before because that directly correlates to the 0.25 value in the offset so if that value was set to negative 0.25 that animation curve would start 0.25 below 0 and if that offset was set to 0.5 then that animation scale would start halfway up rather than starting at 0. so again using the example of moving something from left to right if we had our scale set to 1 and we have our offset set to 0.25 instead of starting from the far left hand side of the frame and going all the way to the far right hand side of the frame that animation would start 25 of the way across the frame and then go all the way to the end of the frame so i'm gonna stop this reset the offset back to zero and we'll leave the scale at one and let's talk about timing in timing you have settings that are very similar to the scale you have a time scale and you have a time offset the time scale is relative to the length of your composition or the length of the clip that you're working with so a time scale of 1.0 means the animation will execute across the entire duration of that clip or 100 of the duration of that clip or that composition so let's set the time scale to 2.0 and see what effect that has on the animation curve so it may not be obvious at first but by setting the time scale to 2.0 what we've told the anim curve to do is to execute that animation twice as fast as normal so instead of the animation curve extending through the duration of the clip or the composition now the anim curve executes fully at 50 percent of the duration of the composition again it's relative to the length and it's considered a percentage so a time scale of 1.0 means that animation executes over a hundred percent of the duration of whatever you're working with whereas if you set that to 2.0 the animation will execute twice as fast and the opposite is true as well so if we wanted to change that time scale to 0.25 for example by changing the time scale to 0.25 what we've told the anim curve to do is execute that animation at 25 of the normal speed so instead of that anim curve now spanning the full duration of the composition or the clip that we're working with that anim curve would need four times the amount of time to fully execute so i'm going to stop that and i'm going to reset the time scale to 1 and then let's look at time offset it behaves very similar to the way the scale offset behaves let's set the time offset to 0.5 so we can see with a time offset of 0.5 the shape of this curve stays the same but it doesn't begin the animation until 50 of the way through the clip so now in the preset there are a lot of other settings you can play around with and of course you could look at every one of the curves and play with these settings in different combinations i'm not going to do any more with the preset today you're free to download that and experiment with it on your own so that you can work through these examples and and see what effect these different settings have based on different combinations that you apply but i'm going to switch over now to a basic animation and see how they play out in a more traditional scenario that you might run across in your animations as you can see we're just animating a square from the left hand side to the center of the screen and i have two versions of this composition the first one is what we're seeing animated now and the second one is what we will work on to illustrate these examples and if i switch over to that second composition you can see that we have no animation present because there are no anim curves no keyframes or anything being used at this point so let's take a look at how we might just recreate that simple animation of the square going from the left to the right so what i'll start with is adding a transform node to the flow quick tip about anim curves i want to animate the x position in this case and move that square from the left to the right one thing you'll notice if we go to try to animate that center attribute is that we can go to modify with but we do not have anim curves as an option in this list and the reason why is because an anim curve modifier only produces one output and a center position uses an x and a y coordinate which requires two inputs so therefore you can't directly apply an anim curve to for example a center position or a pivot or something like that but we can apply an x y path modifier to the center and then once we go to the x y path modifier we can animate the x or the y position independently using an anom curve so now that we've activated the xy path modifier i'm going to disable the keyframes that are created by default and then i'm going to right click on the x position and i'll modify that with an anim curve something that we did not cover in looking at the macro is the curve source and you'll see there are three options available here you have transition duration and custom transition is what would be selected by default if you use the transition in the edit page and that transition was animated using an atom curve for all of our examples today we're going to use the duration source which means the anim curve will be applied to the entire duration of the clip or the composition that we're working on and then that third option is a custom source and by using a custom source you have to tell the anim curve exactly where the animation takes place with keyframes and it doesn't dynamically adapt itself to the length of your composition we're not going to cover the custom source in these examples but if that's something you want to see covered in more detail in a different video drop in a comment and let me know and i'll be sure to cover that in the future so i'll select duration as the source and for curve we have three options and we have thus far only looked at the easing option there's a linear option which really isn't a curve it just is a straight line one other thing that might be beneficial for you as you work with a m curves is to actually take a look at the spline and see what these changes do to the shape of that curve as you're making these adjustments so for example if i click on anim curves here you can see that we just have a diagonal line that represents that curve so it's just a straight line if it's if the curve is set to linear but all the examples that we've looked at so far have been based on a curve of easing and you can see that if we change that curve to easing now instead of being an infinite curve that starts infinitely before the animation and extends infinitely beyond the animation we now have a boundary and now that curve can be affected by the in and out curve shape and again in the macro that we were playing around with before i did not set an ease in curve i left that to none but i was using an ease out curve and for example we were using elastic and a lot of those examples so if i switch to elastic in this case you can see that that curve shape matches exactly what we were seeing in the macro it's just being applied to the x path in this case in our example so i'm going to change this to an expo curve and i'm going to leave all the other settings the same to start with in our anim curve inspector so with a scale of 1 and a time scale of 1 we can see that our x path goes from far left or a position of zero to far right or position of one across the entire duration of our composition so let's say we only want that square to go halfway across the screen we can do that by adjusting the scale so if we set our scale to 0.5 that means that the x position in this case will start on the far left and go halfway across the screen because that scale again is a ratio that would represent 0 as percent one being a hundred percent and point five being fifty percent so if we play through that we can see that our animation now only goes halfway across the screen but you'll notice and it's a little bit hard to tell because it's an exponential curve and the amount of movement really gets small towards the end of the animation even though we're only going halfway across the screen it is taking the full duration of the clip for the square to move from the left to halfway across the screen and one way that we can illustrate that is if we go to the x y path modifier and we take a look at this x position that is now being controlled by the anim curve you can see that as we get closer to the end of that animation it still has not reached the 0.5 position yet but by the last frame it actually does make it all the way to the 0.5 level and now let's say we're happy with the square moving from the left to the center of the composition but we don't want it to take the entire duration of the composition to execute so what we can do now is adjust the time scale to affect how quickly that animation executes so the time scale by default is set to 1.0 and again that means that it will take a hundred percent of the duration of the composition to execute that animation so let's say we want that to execute in one second well this is a 24 frame per second composition and it's three seconds long if we want our animation to execute in one second instead of three seconds we want it to execute three times as fast so if we set our time scale to 3.0 we see now that our square moves from the zero position to the 0.5 position just as it did before but now it happens within one second instead of the full duration of the clip so now if i go back to the beginning of our composition at the zero position we still see part of our square and that's because of the size of the shape that we're animating so if we for example did not want any part of the square to be visible at the beginning of the composition we could adjust the offset and let's try maybe minus 0.1 and see what that gives us okay so that removes it from view but what you'll see is that everything in that scale has been offset by negative 0.1 so yes we moved it to the left at the beginning of the animation but what will happen now is our ending point will also be offset by negative 0.1 so if i play through that you can see that our square no longer makes it to the middle of the screen because we have changed that offset to minus 0.1 or negative 10 percent is the other way to think of that so if we still wanted it to start off screen and that required a gale offset of negative 0.1 but we wanted it to end at exactly the middle of the screen like it was before we can just make an adjustment to our scale and instead of 0.5 set our scale to 0.6 which takes into account the scale offset value of negative 0.1 and ends up with a position of 0.5 once all that gets added together so let me go to the beginning of our composition and we can see that our square is completely off the screen at this point and then if we go to the end of our composition we can see that the square is exactly back the middle of the screen so that gives you a little illustration of how the scale and the offset can work together to accomplish your animation time scale and time offset interact in a similar way let's say we didn't want the animation to start until a half a second in to the length of our composition so again this is a 24 frame per second composition and it's 72 frames long and we want the composition to start at 12 frames in so we can just do simple math to figure out how to set that time offset to accomplish that and that math would be 12 divided by 72 which gives us 0.167 so if we set our time offset to 0.167 we can see that we now have a half a second delay before the animation even starts and then the animation still executes within one second and the position still goes to halfway across the screen so this gives you a basic example of how you can combine scale scale offset time scale and time offset to really dial in the animation and get it to exactly where you want it to be so let's jump back up to curve shape real quick and take a look at what happens if we use the mirror or invert boxes so we'll start by hitting mirror and we can see what happens now is our animation executes fully but it also then executes in reverse so the way the mirror checkbox works is it takes whatever animation you have configured executing across the time scale you've specified it divides that in half and does the beginning of the animation over half of that time duration and then it reverses the animation over the second half of that time duration it was starting a half a second into our composition and executing over a full second so we had a 1.5 second animation to move the square from the left to the center of the screen by checking mirror what the anim curve has done it is now moving the square from the left to the center over 0.75 seconds and then moving the square from the center of the screen back off the screen on the left side and the other 0.75 seconds so instead of our entire animation going from left to right over 1.5 seconds and staying there it now comes in and goes back out off the screen all within a time span of 1.5 seconds that's one of the tricky parts about mirroring because if we wanted to animate something in to our composition and then animate it back out of our composition but have full control over that timing we can't do that with the mirror checkbox there's another way to do that so be sure to catch that second video if you're interested in how to better control intro and outro animations using anime curves so now let's take a look at what the invert checkbox does if i hit invert and play through that it literally inverts whatever animation we have specified so instead of our animation going from left to right our animation is now going from right to left we can also do an illustration of the clip high setting to really see that work we can change our curve to elastic for example we can see that we get that elastic sort of a bounce movement based on the shape of that curve and you can see the extent of that animation it comes well beyond the midpoint out into this vicinity whereas if we check clip high we still get the oscillation of that elastic curve it goes as far as the middle of the screen and then bounces back to the left a little bit and then settles back down but it doesn't go beyond that 0.5 level because clip high cuts off everything that extends above the scale that you have specified in that inner curve so i think that's all i can pack into this video i hope this has helped you gain a better understanding of how to apply atom curves to your projects they're extremely powerful they have lots of benefits and there are some trade-offs that you have to get used to but it's a very powerful tool that can come in really handy as you work on different projects so as i mentioned the second video in the series is going to cover how to do an intro and outro animation and overcome the limitations of the mirror checkbox that you have available by default in the end curves and the third video in this series will take a look at how anim curves without keyframes compare to traditional keyframes and the use of a keyframe stretcher when it comes to adapting your animations to changes in duration or resizing a clip and how those things are re-timed or rescaled accordingly did i miss anything that you wanted to see covered about anim curves or do you have any suggestions for additional topics to cover related to animker drop in a comment and let me know i really enjoy hearing from you in the comments and i'm sure the rest of the community benefits from that input as well and don't forget you can download that macro to play around with these settings and visualize what's going on here just jump over to the buy me a coffee page and grab that free of charge or throw me a coffee if you want to if you found this video informational or useful please do hit that thumbs up button and share it with your friends that really helps the channel out a lot and it shows youtube that you appreciate the content and if you're new here please do consider subscribing hitting that notification bell and enabling all notifications so you'll be alerted whenever i post a new video thanks so much for watching have fun creating and editing i'll see you next time

Channel: Create And Edit

Views: 1,733

Keywords: DaVinci Resolve, Fusion, Motion Graphics, Blackmagic Design, Keyframes, Anim Curves, Animation, Fusion Animation, master class, intro, outro, animations

Id: PiCGmBLvZhk

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022