Animation Question

[Felasco]

I have the trial installed and am testing out the animation.

Do you really have to animate scale, position and rotation separately?  Am I not getting it?

I can see that moving a PIP track across an underlying track is easy.  Or if you just want to scale it, or just want to rotate it, that's easy too.  Simple animations, easy.

But I'm getting confused by more complex animations.  For example, what if you're trying to keep a replacement face (top track) on top of the original face (underlying track), an animation which may require scale, position and rotation all being adjusted in a precise manner?

Here's what I'm used to, in another app animation works like this.    Where ever you choose to stop on the timeline you can adjust the scale, position and rotation of the top track all at once, and a keyframe is created recording all that data.   You deal with all the edits that are needed at that frame at once.  Then you move on down the timeline to the next edit.    Thus, you can always see exactly what you're doing.  You make one pass down the timeline and then you're done.

Is this possible in PE?

I'm only on my second day with PE, so hopefully the problem is me.   Thanks for any advice!

[Steve Grisetti]

Premiere Elements creates separate sets of keyframes for Scale, Position and Rotation -- but they're all Motion keyframes, so you aren't necessarily creating them separately.

If you make your adjustments right on the Monitor panel, by dragging the upper track video to position and resizing and rotating it by dragging on its corner handles, it's fairly intuitive. It sure shouldn't feel like three separate keyframed animations.

But it may be different than what you're used to, which may be making it seem more complicated.

[Felasco]

Hi again Steve, thanks for your reply as always.  Hmm....

You might be calling PE animation intuitive because you haven't seen what real intuitive looks like?  Check out Openshot (free).  It's inferior to PE in too many ways to list, but the keyframe animation seems superior, at least in terms of intuitive ease of use.  The more I animate with PE the more confused I'm getting.   Dang, and I love so much else.

There's the little text on the top of the clip in PE which indicates which property you're currently animating.  Opacity:Opacity, Motion:Scale, Motion:Position etc.  Doesn't this force you to animate one property at a time?

I don't want to animate one property at a time, I want to animate one keyframe at a time.  You know, advance down the timeline, stop at various points, and set the clip properties for what is appropriate at that point in the video.

Is this possible with PE and I'm just too dense to get how?  Like i said, new at this, and still hoping I'm the problem here and not PE.

Thanks!

[Steve Grisetti]

As you say, it's just a different interface. You can still do what you want to do just as simply, once you learn the controls.

Yes, I'm most comfortable with Premiere Elements' keyframing tools. But I also do keyframing on at least four other video editing and effects programs. And, although each a bit different, the principles are all the same.

[Felasco]

Ok, your point is taken.    I just made a 3 second test clip, putting one face fairly precisely on top of another, modest movement of the original face.  It does work, and will work better when I have more experience and on projects where I invest more time. 

But to get a 3 second clip to work reasonably well, I had to switch back and forth between properties about 100 times.  I guess I'm going to have to make peace with this, or make peace with finding another editor.  Or both.

It should work like this.  You move to a position in the video and create a keyframe.  Then you edit the position, scale and rotation etc of the PIP clip in the video viewer by manipulating the handles of the clip until it looks the way you think it should.  Then you proceed to the next position in the video, create a new keyframe, and edit that position etc. 

PE has many other amazing features, and the whole thing seems very well designed.  So I hate to whine.  Except that I'm considering PE primarily for a specific use, which it doesn't seem too adept at.   Oh well, I have 29 days to prove myself wrong.  🙂

[Steve Grisetti]

I'm not sure what you're doing if you had to switch back and forth between properties 100 times, Felasco. You're making all of your adjustments to a single property -- Motion. You're just making adjustments to three attributes of that property -- Scale, Position and Motion.

If you make the adjustments on the Monitor panel rather than in the Applied Effects panel, as I said above, it should be simple and intuitive. You just drag on the object or its corner handles to make adjustments to its scale, position and rotation and the program automatically creates the keyframes.

But switching back and forth between properties 100 times just to follow a person around your video frame sounds excessive to me. I'm just not sure what you're doing.

[Felasco]

Hi Steve,

Well, I'm just not sure what I'm doing either, obviously.  🙂  Seriously, I am truly hoping this is the problem, because that can be fixed.

Above in the thread I asked you this....

"There's the little text on the top of the clip in PE which indicates which property you're currently animating.  Opacity:Opacity, Motion:Scale, Motion:Position etc.  Doesn't this force you to animate one property at a time?"

I don't yet see a way to modify multiple properties at once.  As example, if I want my clip to both change position and size I have to first choose Motion:Position, and make that edit.  Then I switch to Motion:Scale, and make that edit.    And then I run to issues like, how do I know the appropriate position until I have the scale right?

What I want to do this is.  Go to a particular frame of the video.  Grab the handles of the clip and position, scale and rotate until the clip looks correct.   Then proceed down the timeline to the next edit.

If this is possible and I'm doing it wrong, that would be great and I'll stop whining and start learning.

If this isn't possible then that would be good to know as well, as I'll stop banging my head on it, which would also end the whining.  🙂

My confusion at the moment is that I'm not yet clear whether the obstacle is me or the app.  I'm hoping it's me.

Given the time you're investing in my questions I should ask, would you rather do this here or on your forum?  Agreeable either way.