In this After Effects tutorial, join Motion Designer Eugene Peterson as he dives into using the Time Remapping (also called Time Ramping or Speed Ramping) feature to fine-tune your animation.
Video Transcription
Hello, this is Eugene Peterson for Noble Desktop. And in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to use the time-remapping effect in Adobe After Effects. For a first example, this is a purposely busy animation, lots of motion, lots of nested pre-comps, and secondary animation. (Really, really busy.) The client or the art director indicates that this sequence needs to be shorter.
All those key frames, all that nesting to test time remapping to the rescue. So I'll just go over how busy this thing actually is. So if we go into the time remapping composition, you will see we have a scaled transformation null that is scaling this entire animation over time. And we have a nested pre-comp that has pre-comps inside.
So nesting inside of nesting. And then we also have the rounded rectangle with the trim path attached to it. So really, really busy. And when I think about shortening this six-second animation to two 5 seconds, that seems like a daunting task except time remapping makes it super easy. The keyboard shortcut is for Mac option Commands + T and for Windows Old Control + T, and it places default keyframes at the beginning and at the end of the layer.
So to shorten it, it's really this simple. Let's shorten it by one second. All we have to do is drag the end keyframe here, set new workspace and here we go. This entire animation is now one second shorter. How quick is that? I love it. Okay, for our next example, this deals with another type of last-minute change.
Let's say that the music track needed to be swapped out, and what I have here is an animation with some mountain ridges coming into view and notice that the ridges come into view right by the markers. So this is kind of like where we would want our crescendos to be. Let's say that we want to change this to 2 seconds, 4 seconds, 6 seconds, and 80 seconds.
So we actually have to move the animation to match the new music well at the keyboard shortcut. And we have our time remapping and it places the default beginning and end of the layer keyframes. Now, all we have to do is place keyframes at these marker positions so that we know that here is where the new ridge will appear.
And then we said we were going to time this to 2 seconds. So we just moved this marker here we go to 4 seconds, move this marker here, 6 seconds, this marker here, and then finally 8 seconds this marker here and since I had one selected, so move that back. Okay? And then we have our final ten. So let's see what that looks like.
Now. All right, Perfect. Look at that. Right on the money music. So timing can be rigid. Time signatures, beats per minute. The vibe. These parameters tend to be inflexible for layout. Timer mapping even works for audio files. For this example, we've placed a YouTube studio free music track onto the Timeline song to play the beginning part for a few seconds.
Okay, that's the beginning. And we'll go to the end here. Okay, track, that's about 3 minutes long. We're going to add time remapping to slightly to adjust the time. What works best practice is like one, two or 3 seconds, which can be a really big deal when you're in a final. Leo. Edit We've talked about the keyboard shortcuts before.
We're going to do it a little differently this time. So one way to do this is layer time enable time remapping or you can right click the layer, go to time, enable time remapping. Alright, as mentioned before, we're just going to take 2 seconds off, so I'll move this keyframe to here and actually see the audio waveform shift.
As we do that. Now let's play the same track again, same part of the track again. Okay. And then towards the end, so for more elaborate audio editing, use an audio file editor like Adobe Audition or Audacity, but for quick one to second type edits, this is the cat's meow. For a final example, we're going to use this Adobe Stock Free video.
I'll play the video. Okay, so one time remapping with the keyboard shortcut, giving us the default beginning and ending keyframes. And within this work area, I'm just going to randomly pick some points in the action in the video that we might want to jump back and forth between kind of create an instant replay effect. So I'm just going to pick a couple of random spots like where the action happens, like here that looks interesting and here as it disperses, then finally, as the ink starts to disseminate.
Yeah. And now what I'm going to do is start moving these keyframes around, basically reordering time or the timing of the video. I'm just going to evenly spaced these out and whoa, there you go. Fabulous. All righty. That's all for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to use the time remapping effect in Adobe after Effects. This has been Eugene Peterson for knowable desktop.