Reuse complex animations

[stardealer]

I have created many slides with complex animations of several objects, often with childrelations and different keypoints on the different childlevels of a object node.

I use these slides or part of these slides as templates (cut&paste) whenever I create a slideshow.

After changing the used pictures sometimes it is sufficient to modify slide time with "scale keypoints",

but often a group of combined objects needs adjustments like "move 1 second further" or "move 1 second back" or "compress animation time by 30%" or extend animation time by 20%" and so on.

To rework all depending keypoints to one animation is a) complicated needs much time and c) needs more than 1 attempt to get it right.

I think some difficulties could be solved if there were functions for

a) move all keypoints of marked objects +/- X milliseconds (without moving keypoints exactly at starttime of slide or endtime of slide)

compress/stretch all keypoints of marked objects by factor X (working the same way as modify slide time with "scale keypoints" but only calculated for the marked objects)

With these functions every predesigned animation can be reused much more easy and also timing animations to music would be much easier.

Regards, Frank

[Lin Evans]

Hi Frank,

I'm just wondering if you are perhaps using non-linear functions with your keyframes. If you copy and paste then change images then change keyframe positions, unfortunately you may need to set all keyframes back to non-linear before the change or you will probably experience unexpected results. This is a difficult issue to contend with from a programming perspective.

I too would like to be able to move not only all keyframes by a certain percentage or time, but do it selectively. Hopefully, in a future version we may be able to do this, but for now the best we can do is to move "all" keyframes by the "scale keyframes" method. This, however works best when the keyframes are linear. When changing non-linear keyframes one at a time it gets really tedious. I've found the "best" way is to simply set everything back to linear, move the keyframes then reset the non-linear (smooth, etc.) functions "after" all moving of keyframes has been completed.

Best regards,

Lin

[stardealer]

Hi Lin,

in many animations I use non-linear movements but until now I thought scaling all positions of combined objects the same way with the same percentage wouldn't change the appearance.

I thought of it as a time lapse or slow motion when all relative positions are still the same.

Of course when changing not all corresponding keypoints at once then non-linear movement has to be reworked in the way you have described.

This would mean for described function a. - finetuning of non-linear movements may be necessary if keypoints exist at start- or endtime of slide.

I think it is not difficult for Igor and his team to implement such calculating functions in the "right-click-menu" with effect to all marked objects in O&A the same way like copy and paste, so maybe he can give a try in a beta of 5.7.

Regards, Frank