User manual

126 Animating with Keyframes
In Motion, keyframes work much the same way: You are the senior artist, creating your
composition and identifying the frames you want to establish as keyframes; and the com-
puter acts as the junior artist, creating in-between frames of animation through a process
called interpolation.
Whether you should choose to animate using keyframes or behaviors is not always a
clear-cut decision; but as a rule of thumb, if you want repeated, continuous motion—such
as a graphic drifting across the screen, a pendulum swinging, or a neon sign blinking—
use behaviors. If you want animation that starts, stops, and changes direction at specific
points in time, use keyframes.
In this lesson, you’ll open the stage project and animate the curtains using keyframes to
compare that method to animating with behaviors. You’ll also experiment with interpola-
tion types and adjusting keyframe Bezier handles. We’ll then set and adjust keyframes in
the Rockumentary project to animate multiple layers to form a composition.
Recording Keyframes
The easiest way to set keyframes is to turn on recording. When recording is turned on,
every change you make to any keyframeable parameter will be recorded as a keyframe at
the playhead location, locking in the new value at that point in time. In this exercise, you
will use recording to set a keyframe for the rotation value of the first cog, which will cause
the curtains to part.
1 Open Motion5_Book_Files > Lessons > Lesson_04 > Keyframes Start, and save the
project to the Student_Saves folder.
This is the stage project you worked with in the previous lesson. The position of the
curtains is linked to the Cog1 layer with the Link behavior, as is the rotation of all the
other cog layers. But the Cog1 layer is not currently animated. You can test the anima-
tion by rotating the Cog1 layer.
2 Open the Stage and Gears groups, select the Cog1 layer, and in the Canvas, drag the
rotation handle.