"accelerating" with time remapping

Is there a way to "continously" alter the speed of a clip, rather than sticking in a bunch of teeny little keyframe segments in an attempt to fake the appearance of a smooth acceleration (or deceleration) from one play back speed to another?

Read up on the Time Remapping tool in the manual.

It's one of those things that's really hard to describe in words. You really need to get in there and futz with the tool and figure it out. The manual is helpful as it explains the behavior pretty well.

And there is a great video tutorial at www.proapptips.com:

[www.proapptips.com]

CLick on CAPT. MENCH's VIDEOS, and then TIME REMAP. I finally get that tool now.

Thanks, y'all!

(That video answered my specific question perfectly, Shane)

scotty

Make more tutorials please.
that one was very helpful thanks.



SL8UP

OH we are. I have 4 that I need to encode and add. Not as slick as the Capts, but they tell a process.

If yo have ideas for tutorials, what you'd like to see, please let us know. We'll see about doing them.

The best way to learn, apart from doing, is seeing.

no Shane,

the best way to learn is by teaching..

so you;re way ahead

nick

Hey Shane,

What are the possibilities you guys might put the tutorials into alternate formats? I can't view them because most likely they are either QuickTime 7 files or H.264 files.

Good idea Derek. We should have two options.

Right now they are h.264.

and now there are QT6 versions up there



David at Movies Rock in Toronto
[www.tofcpug.com]

i havent had to do this sort of thing (accelerate / decelerate) much.

but i pretty much know i wouldn't want to speed up a clip, then have it slow down again,
or vice versa.

is it possible with that time re-map thing to just do a simple thing like go from normal speed then ramp down to slo-mo?

nick

>>>is it possible with that time re-map thing to just do a simple thing like go from normal speed then ramp down to slo-mo.


Yeah, smoothing a time remap keyframe (Control-click the keyframe on the Time Remap keyframe graph and choose Smooth from the SC menu) on the clip's Motion tab gives you bezier handles. You can use the bezier handle to "bend" the clip's speed and create smooth accelerate or decelerate effects with a single keyframe applied.

Hey Shane,

Thanks to you guys for putting the QuickTime 6 versions of the tutorials up there. However, the video file doesn't quite address the concern I'd raised earlier about the "must add up to 100 per cent" thing:

When I read the Weinand FCP book and looked up Time Remap, my concern with it was that the duration of the clip had to remain constant in order to preserve editing decisions as to In/Out points, hence the Subclipping step. But since the duration of the clip -- the amount of space it occupies in the timeline -- must remain constant, there is no way to speed up Part A of a clip without slowing down Part B of that same clip by a directly proportionate amount. And there's no way to, for example, make the clip start fast at 500 per cent, but then play it at normal speed until the end of the number of frames chosen for the edit. No matter how many keyframes you add, all the sections added together must still equal 100 per cent of the original duration of the subclip chosen. Even if certain parts go backwards, at some point or another the clip would have to go forwards at high speed to compensate and maintain the clip duration.

It seems to me the only way to have real control over how fast each part goes, overriding of the length of the original non-speed-changed clip, is to razor and then speed-change each section individually. It's just very rare that I'd want a 50 per cent slow-mo on one part and then the exact amount of speed-up on the rest of the clip.

Perhaps that's what Nick was referring to? I know that whenever I use speed ramps, In/Out points and how fast a section goes are usually much more important to me than the original duration of the overall segment.

All true up to a point. You can keyframe the material so that the entire section that needs to be speeded up or whatever to encompass the 100% can take place in one frame, and that one frame can be trimmed off.

The only catch here is that though the duration of the clip is constant, it can draw from any media available to the clip. So your six second clip, which may have been cut out of a 20 minute piece of media, all that 20 minutes can be called up to execute the time remap. Making a subclip makes no difference to this. Time remap can call up all the frames available in the QT media file. Usually the best solution is to export just the clip you want to create a separate, single piece of media, make the time change you want to that, and you shouldn't have any problem achieving the result you want with a few keyframes.



All the best,

Tom

You can use all this excess handle to pull off your move and then merely trim off the undesirable part after the remap is done.



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the whole thing seems rather complicated,
and requiring a skill and patience matched only by what you need to master the crazy "Snake of Death" when plotting a pan/zoom.

what one really wants, of course is to be able to simply plot

A:where your clip starts and ends (in and out points)
and
B: where the speed changes start and end, with whatever acceleration you need

after that, FCP should deal with the rest, and ADJUST YOUR CLIP LENGTH ACCORDINGLY

the terrible irony is of course that this behaviour (in & out points respected, clip length changes) is what we get with a simple speed mod,
but most people don't want it!

------------------------------------

ok, i've just been doing, rather than simply reading,
and i'm starting to get the hang of it.
thanks, Lisa, et al.

it's still not real-world for me as i'm doing out of curiosity at the moment
(in all these years i;'ve never had to actually Do this!)

but moving on from my point about Time re-map disregarding the in/outs:

THIS is what most people what when they do a speed mod,
they want the clip duration to hold, while the content speeds or slows
and it's dead easy to achieve:

open clip into viewer
go to Time Remap
if you like your clips' in point,
grab the keyframe on the out-side of the clip,
if you want to keep the out point, grab the in-coming keyframe

move it up or down to your desired speed.

SPEED CHANGES, DURATION DOESN'T

i'm able to hit 50%, and 100% if i take it back up
they seem to be a bit "sticky" which is a good thing

150% and 200% are also sticky

i cant hit 25%, 75% 33.33 or 66.67 easily
they're NOT sticky

manually entering a value gives the old behaviour: clip duration changes.
if i lock the track, FCP removes the clip from the viewer

there's probably lots of variables, (clip duration, clip handle, etc) that could cause snags,
but for me right now, this seems pretty easy.

always something new to discover!

cheers,
nick