Anyone good with A . Aftereffects? Some help on animation?

[dvd_master]

I'm making a rotating image in After Effects, and by going to Effects - Perspecctive - Basic 3D I can see the image I want swiviling if I manually turn the cursor. After that, I try to export and then the video only had the picture motionless where I last left it.

How can I have it export so it keeps turning?

I was told to "keyframe the rotation" but I got no idea how to do that.

Can anyone walk me through it? Please?

[baz00ie]

You might want to go to the Adobe website and check out the tutorials they have there. They're quite good and should help you get a better understanding of how KeyFrames work.

http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects/main.html

Good luck

baz

[Arky]

Yes, this is a keyframes issue.

At it's very simplest, keyframes can be added by:

1) setting the timeline cursor at the position where you want the animation to begin from. Generally, this will be 00:00:00:00

2) with step one having been set, now manipulate your desired start position of your animation in the viewer (purely for the sake of description, let's call it "Zero Degrees").

3) Now set the Timeline cursor to the END of your animation.

4) Now reposition your animation in the viewer to where you want it to finish. In the case of the animation finishing in the same position as it started, you would still have to manipulate it in the viewer for however many rotations you desired, before finally positioning it in the original position. In other words, you need to physically TELL/SHOW After Effects that you wish it to rotate one or more times by manually doing just that when you set your last keyframe. So, if the image fully rotates 3 times, for example, then you'd need to make sure After Effects knows this by physically rotating your object in the viewer three times. This would be numerically shown as 1080 degrees (360 x 3). You can simply type in the numbers instead, if you like. Entirely up to you.

5) The above may achieve what you wish to do, but if you wish to be more complex and alter the acceleration/deceleration, or the axis of rotation, this is very simple - you simply position the timeline cursor somewhere in between the start and end keyframes, and alter the position of your object in the source viewer as you desire. In this way, you can keep adding keyframes and After Effects will smoothly calculate the areas in between the keyframes you made. If you wish, you can instruct After Effects to use different methods of keyframe smoothing, such as bezier spline etc. My advice is to start simple and only when you have succeeded with a simple animation, then try for something a little more complex. Also, be sure to enable motion-smoothing/blending when you set the render queue parameters, as this will give you a subjectively smoother path of travel in the final video file.


This is a difficult thing to explain just in words, but it's really simple to actually do, so have confidence!


Arky ;o)