Final Cut Pro Tutorial: How to Use Keyframes to Animate Objects in Final Cut Pro

hey there it's izzy here again in this video we'll take a look at a few different ways to create animations in Final Cut Pro using keyframes and when I talk about animations I'm not talking about like animated cartoons or anything like that I'm talking about just making changes to things over time and so to demonstrate this I have a very basic project set up and by the way I'm gonna make the assumption that if you're watching this video you've maybe heard of keyframes before but you're not really familiar with them or maybe you just want to learn more about them but I'm gonna start at the very basics and we're gonna start with fundamentals of how to work with keyframes what they are how they work how you can use them okay so let's start by moving the playhead to the beginning of this project you can see I've got a video clip and then a title attached to it as a connected clip and then if I hit the spacebar and play this back then you'll see that the title pops on and then when it gets to the end of the title then it pops off again I'll stop the playback so let's say that hypothetically we don't want to have the title just pop on and off I want to have it slide in from the side so maybe I'll start off screen here it'll slide into its position hang out there for a few seconds and then slide off again alright so if I want to do that this is a great opportunity to use fundamental keyframe concepts so what we'll do is we'll start by moving the playhead to the very beginning of the title so now the playhead is on the first frame of the title there I've got my title selected and then I'm going to come up here and open up the inspector go to the video inspector and then under transform position is what we want to look at so a position is called a parameter and then we have the x position and then the value right now is zero and then we have the Y position and the value right now for a Y position is zero and so since Y is a vertical position and X is the horizontal position what we're going to animate is this x value now when I say animate basically all we're going to do is we're going to set two values we're going to have a start value for X and an end value for x and then Final Cut Pro will create the animation as it changes from one value like point A to point B it'll just automatically create the animation to go from one value to the other one so what we'll do is we'll start by adding a keyframe to this position where the playhead is so this is an important thing to know you position the playhead first so it knows where to put the keyframe Final Cut Pro needs to know where you're going to put the keyframe and so I'm putting it right here on the first frame of this title which happens to be twelve frames into the project okay so now what I'll do is I'll come up here and if I hover to the right side of the parameters here you can see that there's this little gray diamond that appears as I hover over these parameters and that's the add keyframe button it only appears when you're hovering there you can see that if I move my mouse pointer away then the add keyframe button goes away but if I position my mouse pointer over this parameter then I can come over here to the right side and I can click on this button and it'll add a keyframe now the term keyframe comes from the concept where animators used to say okay here's a keyframe with a key position so maybe you have a character that's in a certain pose that's a key position so that'd be a keyframe and then a little bit later you have another key position so that would be another keyframe and then somebody else would come in and do the tweening or the between of animations where they draw all the different poses to get from one key frame to the other key frame that's where this concept comes from now here we're not dealing with cartoon animation we're dealing with just having a title slide in and out but what we're going to do is still use the same concept of having two keyframes and then let Final Cut Pro do the animation to get from one position to the other one so now that I've got this keyframe set up you can see if I move my mouse pointer away that's now yellow that lets me know that there's a keyframe on that frame for that value so here this position parameter has a keyframe you can see from the yellow diamond and it's only there it's only a yellow diamond if the playhead is sitting right on that frame if I move to play at somewhere else then what happens is that diamond goes away because there's not a keyframe where the playhead is right now now if you want to very easily get back to the previous position that has a keyframe on it you can just use this previous keyframe button here I'll just click on that and you'll see that the playhead moved back to the first frame in the title now we want the title to start off screen now right now it's on the screen so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to click and drag on this x-value here I'll just click and drag it to the left to position it so there we go the title is moving off the screen and once it's no longer showing up I can leave it right there so it looks like about negative 6 30 I'll just type that in here negative 6 30 and then hit return okay so that's the first keyframe in in other words on this frame right here the value of the x-value the exposition here is negative 630 now what I can do is move the playhead forward in time like this and let's say that at the one-second mark I'll just move the playhead right there now you can see I'm at one second let's say that I want this to be in its original position so I want to have it go to the zero value if I just click and drag this to the right then as I get close to zero I'm gonna just go ahead and change it to zero there okay so now the value is zero and I didn't have to manually add another keyframe you can see Final Cut Pro added that keyframe for me and this is one thing to be careful of any time you make any changes to a value of a parameter that already has a keyframe Final Cut Pro will automatically create more keyframes so if you're not paying attention to that you can accidentally end up with more keyframes than you intended to have in this case we have two keyframes we set up one at the very beginning if I click the previous keyframe button there's the first keyframe the value is negative six thirty and then I'll click the next keyframe button here's the second keyframe at the one-second mark and the value is zero there and so now with those two keyframes in place then what Final Cut Pro does is it creates what's called interpolation interpolation is the automatic calculation of the values in between those two frames so that we create a nice smooth animation going from one position to the other one or one value to the other one let's take a look I'm going to move the playhead to the beginning hit the spacebar and we should see the title slides in from the side and sure enough it does okay so now that's the basic concept two keyframes with two different values you'll have some sort of change in those values to get from one value to the other one now a very common type of situation is to have something animate to a certain position hold there for a little bit and then animate away from that position so that's what we'll do here too to demonstrate this because in this very common scenario it actually takes four keyframes two keyframes to get the item into position and then two keyframes to get it out of position so what I'll do is I'll move the playhead to maybe somewhere around here something like that doesn't have to be exact and then I'll come up here and add another keyframe and I'm going to manually add this keyframe because Final Cut Pro isn't going to automatically create a keyframe for me because I didn't change any of these values I'm being these values exactly the way they are so the previous keyframe had the value at zero and this key frames gonna have the value at zero because I want to stay in place to this point so I'll just add a keyframe here and then I'll move the playhead to the end go back one frame so that I'm on the last frame of the title and then I can change this back to what was it negative six thirty so I'll just click and drag it over like this and type negative six thirty there we go so now I have it so it'll slide into position and then it'll slide out of position let's take a look I'll move the playhead to the beginning hit the spacebar and play it back you can see it slides in and then it holds there until it gets to that keyframe and then start sliding away again okay so now we've created a very common type of scenario now so far all we've done is add keyframes and make changes here in the inspector but you can actually do more than that for example if I want to see the timing of keyframes if I want to see where they are in time then there's another tool for this it's called the video animation editor I'm going to move the playhead over the title I'll select the title and then I'm going to go up to the clip menu and then go down to show video animation and if this is something you do a lot you probably do want to memorize the keyboard shortcut ctrl V but I'm just gonna click this here in the menu show video animation as you can see here there are several different parameters that could be animated but transform and it's set to alright now I'm going to change this to position and now I see the keyframes here there's a keyframe there at the beginning of the title and then there's that second keyframe for the position two and then here's the third keyframe and then there's the fourth keyframe if you want to change the position of keyframes in time so for example if you want to have this be a slower animation the more frames there are between the two keyframes then the slower the animation is and vice versa so if I just click and drag this to the right I'll just drag it really far to make it very slow and then I'll move the playhead here and then hit the spacebar you can see that it very slowly slides into position if I want to be extra fast then I can go like this and just have a few frames between them and then it just zips into position and we'll play this back there we go I mean it command Z a couple times to return it to its original position and here's an interesting tip if you actually click the line in between these two then what happens is I've got this keyframe selected and that keyframe selected at the same time so then at that point I can just click in drag and move both of them in time at the same time so if you want to do that that's something that's an option too so you can kind of bounce back and forth between the inspector and the video animation editor to make some changes so for example if I want to move the playhead over that keyframe then what I can do is come up here and make changes to the value right now it's set to zero but let's say I want it to be something else like 600 for example type in 600 here okay so that's the position so you can change the value up here and you can change the timing of the keyframes down here I'll play this back just so we can see it slide into that position there we go you'll notice it immediately starts to drift off to this other keyframes position that's because there's a difference in values between these two keyframes once this is no longer zero anymore once this is set to 600 then this is zero then it has to go from 600 to zero and it has to do it over the course of these frames here in between them but I'm going to change this back to zero again so we'll just change that to zero play this back make sure everything's working and sure enough it is good and by the way there is a third place where you can add keyframes if you're somebody who likes to work in a visual type of interface then maybe this is something that would be useful to you too what you can do is click here to get into your transform modes and then if you're not seeing this by the way if you just click here you can go to transform crop or distort but I'm going to choose transform here and then you have this little area up here and the center button adds a keyframe wherever the playhead is and then these buttons go to the next keyframe and the previous keyframe so if I wanted to add a keyframe here I can just click this button like that and then you can see it gets added there but I'm going to ctrl click on it or right-click on it and choose delete keyframe to get rid of it now one thing you'll notice is that I deleted the position keyframe but you can see that there are other keyframes still there they're just darkened if I go to all then you'll see that I've got keyframes not just on the position but also up here you can see under rotation and also scale and the anchor point I don't want any of those so I'm gonna select this and just hit delete on the keyboard now my own personal work style is I don't tend to use this up here very much for adding keyframes because I like to be very specific I like to add a keyframe to a specific parameter that's just my own personal preference so I don't need to have keyframes on rotation scale if I'm only trying to animate position I'm going to disable this mode and then I'll close down the video animation editor for the title but the position of something or the rotation or scale that's not just everything that you can animate you can animate all kinds of different parameters I think this becomes really useful when it comes to animating effects or animating the opacity of something or making those types of changes over time so as a demonstration let's add an effect to this video clip I'll just scroll down here go to the effects browser I've got this cold steel effect here I'm just gonna click and drag and drop it on the video clip and then I'll close down the effects browser so now we've got this really strange looking effect here on the video but let's say I want to fade this up I want this effect to become something that's there but gradually over time well this is one of those situations where because I'm doing something making some sort of change gradually it makes sense to use keyframes so what I can do is select the video clip and then up here in the video inspector you can see here's the cold steel and anytime you hover over a parameter and you see this diamond off to the edge there that means that that is something that you can add keyframes to and if you can add keyframes to it that means you can animate it so let's try this I'm going to move the playhead to the very beginning like that and then I'll add a keyframe on the amount and let's actually change the value to zero here so it's going to start with a value an amount value of zero and I'll move the playhead forward here a little bit I've already got a keyframe on this parameter so I don't need to manually add another one I don't need to click here it's gonna do it automatically for me I could if I wanted to I could click an add one but I don't need to what I can do now is just drag this amount slider up and then you can see Final Cut Pro adds a keyframe for me there and now we've got the value set here at 100 so once again I have two keyframes one at the beginning with the amount at zero one here at this position with the amount at 100 so now if I move the play to the beginning hit the spacebar and play this back then we've got the animation now there's a couple more quick things I want to show you when it comes to working with the video animation editor in particular so if I open up the video animation editor I'll select it go up to a clip go to show video animation and then I'll scroll up here so we can see the top part you can see here's cold steel and I've got the amount selected so that's what I'm animate right now there's a keyframe at the very beginning that little white diamond and there's a keyframe right here with some parameters certain parameters and Final Cut Pro you can adjust not just the position of keyframes in time but also the value and the way you can know if a certain parameter has that capability is if you see this little icon there so this little pop-up icon if I click on that then what happens is this expands and now I see a little graph showing me what the animation looks like so you can see here there's a keyframe and the values 0 there and then here at this frame I'll move the playhead to that position you can see that there's a keyframe there and the value is a hundred and so you can actually make adjustments to the value here instead of having to come up here to the inspector you can just make adjustments to the value here so I'll just click and drag and bring this down and you can add more keyframes so for example if I want to add one here I can option click like that and then I could add one here an option click and then I'll drag that one up all the way up to 100 so now what we've got is a situation where it's gonna go from zero to about fifty stay there to that point and then it's gonna go up all the way to 100 let's take a look I'll just hit the spacebar and play this back and sure enough the values coming in or the effects coming in then it goes all the way up I'm gonna delete these so I can just click and drag like this to select these and then hit delete on the keyboard and that'll get rid of them and then what I can do is drag this one up like this to make it all the way up to 100 and there's actually another shortcut I want to show you and that is if you bring up the range tool select the range selection tool like that then what you can do is click and drag inside here to select a range and then you come up to this line and you can just click on it and drag down like that and it'll automatically add those four keyframes so there's a keyframe there there there and there so at that point what you can do is create something like this where it starts off at a hundred percent I'll move the playhead over here and then it quickly goes down to zero stays at zero all the way to this point then goes back up to 100 again let's take a look sure enough it's gonna go all the way down stay down and then go all the way back up again that can be a nice quick way to add four keyframes I'll go back to the normal Select tool and let's delete these keyframes and I'll just select them and hit delete on the keyboard and then let's also delete this keyframe here at the beginning I'll just control click or right click and choose delete keyframe now the last thing I want to show you is that if you're in a situation where you're working with a parameter like this where you can make adjustments to the value not just to the timing of keyframes then you also end up with these little fade handles so instead of having to create keyframes to fade and effect up for example then what you can do is just use a fade handle so I'll just click and drag on this like this and then I'll drag it in like that and you can see now what I've got is a fade up type of an effect where it starts off with no effect and then it fades it all the way up to a hundred so let's take a look I'll just hit the spacebar and play back sure enough it's the effect that we'd expect so the fade handles they appear when you hover over them like this so I'll just click and drag that back into it's original position you have those for both the beginning I'll command - command - command - that way I can see the end of the clip as well you have it for the beginning as well as the end of the video clip so you can very quickly create fade in and fade out type of effects when you're done with a video animation editor you can just click this little button to close it down and then I'll scroll down so I can see my project again those are the basics of how keyframes and animation work in Final Cut Pro now in my opinion if you're going to be doing a lot of animating if animation is a big part of what you do in your video projects it probably makes sense to invest in Apple's other app called motion which is a $50 app on the Mac App Store and that has all kinds of tools that help you really fine-tune and finesse keyframes and animations it's built for that Final Cut Pro definitely has the capabilities of working with keyframes it's just that motion has more anyway hopefully that information is useful to you if you like this video please give it a thumbs up make sure you subscribe to the channel also I made a mini course on media management and Final Cut Pro that I'm giving away to anyone who gets on my email list and it covers a bunch of important things about media and Final Cut Pro like where to store your media files and how to work with proxy media and how to use Final Cut Pro backups and a bunch of other topics if you want access to this media management course for free register at this URL is e video comm ford slash media I hope all this helps thanks for watching and I'll talk to you again soon you

Channel: izzyvideo

Views: 11,521

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Id: c00CWAB25rg

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 04 2020