Variable speed on single shot FCP 7

Hello all,

I want to do what seems to be a basic function in FCP 7 but can't seem to get the right result.

What I have....

I have one shot of a car coming towards the camera around 10 seconds long. At about second 2 a person yells from the car and at the end they are close to the camera and yell again.

What I want to do...

I want to to have the shot start out at 100% speed, after they yell the first time I want it to quickly ramp up to 350% until they are close to the camera and just before they yell again I want it to ramp back down to 100%.

The problems...
I just can't get the speed segments to work for me. I'm not using the speed/beziers because its way to sensitive and confusing. The timeline variable speed makes more sense to me but I can't seem to understand how the ramp up/down buttons work. There doesn't seem to be a way to ramp down to a speed at the end of a shot.. only up from the beginning. I don't want a gradual arc over the entire fast section. I just want it to ramp up quickly and hold the max speed of 350% until the end where is should ramp back down again. (imagine a table-top jump not an arc.

I've tried cutting the shot into 3 pieces, using the entire shot with speed segments.. nothing seems to work. Any help would be great.
Thanks.

Yeah that's what I would do - chop the shot into three. The first part, up to the yell, leave at 100%. The second part, right after the yell, adjust with command j to be 350% then the third section, leave at 100%. It need not be a variable speed thing at all, just a single speed adjustment to the middle section.

Thanks Jude,

That's basically what I did. I cut after the first yell and left at 100% the mid driving section I sped up to 350% using the "ramp up" and "ramp down" arc buttons (that had no effect on the head and tail of the mid segment at all) and the final bit left at %100. I had to trim the middle section after using the speed segment change so that the frame at the end was the frame just before the final %100 percent clip. It miraculously lined up and I reconnected the shot.

The problem is still there though. It was basically a long way round to arrive at what is just an instantaneous speed change at the two cuts in the clip. I really wanted it to speed up over a series of frames to appear as though it accelerated and de-accelerated. No such luck...