Easing your animation

Hey and welcome back, in this video were going to look at easing. Now think of easing as things like a neuter or adding a bit of real life to our type. Because at the moment it’s got a little power pointy effect where it just chugs on and it just stops. It’s not keeping up with the frame rate so I'm going to turn my resolution down to a quarter just to speed things up. It chugs along and just stops and its not very exciting, so what we need to do is add something that makes it feel a little bit more real or believable, think of it when say you want to go for a run, you're going to start slow and it'll end up being a run but there's no instantaneous speed. That’s what our type has and it doesn’t look very nice.

So were going to give it a bit of real life action by doing something called easing. To do it, you do it to the key frames. So you can right click any of these key frames. If you're on a mac and you cant right click, you just hold down the control key and give it a click. There are options on a mac as well to go off and often the mouse does have the ability to right click, you can turn it on. But if you don’t, hold control and give these a click. So I'm going to right click this key frame and I'm going to go to this one that says key frame assistant and were going to go to easy ease. Nothing really changes, you can see the little icon there it is now a little hourglass. Now we’re going to do it to this end one as well so were going to right click him, go to key frame assistant, go to easy ease. Now easy ease is not as extreme as id like it to be. So prepare yourself, its not going to be super exciting yet, were going to make it exciting, but at the moment we hit space bar.

This has got a bit more of a real life movement. It slides in, it starts slow, ends slow. It goes fast in the middle here. and that’s what easing it, it adds a bit of slowness to the beginning or end so that’s the easy ease. Now the problem with easy ease, its not enough for me, I like to really extreme that up, now what were going to do is were going to right click this guy, and instead of going to key frame assistant, were going to go to key frame velocity and this is a manual way of over riding it. The easy ease is 33%, what were going to do is were going to bump it right up to 70% and you do it for both sides, it’s the easiest way to learn, just do 70%, same with this one, right click it, and velocity and change this to 70%. Now you don’t have to add easy ease first. I just showed you that one because that’s what a lot of people use and they like it. I don’t. I like to make it instead of 33, make it 70, make it nice and extreme. So you can go straight to velocity.

Now, be prepared for awesomeness. Are you ready, space bar. Whoosh. I add sound effects all the way through this course, I'm sorry I can’t stop it. You add your own. Look at that, that’s one of the two secret ingredients to making things that you’ve done in after effects, a lot of people teach themselves and they do okay, but its not until you add things like easing and another one called motion blur before you're like that’s cool and that’s after effects.

Alright, so lets do it to the last ones as well, so you can select them both at the same time, see this I can drag a box around the two, right click one of them and then go straight to key frame velocity, go in here and set it to 70%. Click okay and they both change at the same time. Ready, space bar. (Dan’s sound effect) and then it pauses for probably far too long but I want to see those little pixels fall in the background, the little snowy things. And then (Dan’s sound effect) nice. Cool!

Alright, that’s our first step in making our type look more awesome. Make sure you save your file, command s or file save and ill see you in the next video.