How to add "ease" to an animation?

After a long time, I have finished my first project! Overflowing with pride I posted it for some people to see and they gave me a piece of advice to add "ease" to an animation (by animation I mean picture moving and rotating at the same time). They have Adobe Premiere, so they couldn't explain it to me.

Without seeing what you did it's hard to tell what they meant. It's the most likely that you need to 'ease' your keyframes in and out, which means that they don't go from still to movement without accelerating or braking. You can do this in Fusion in the spline editor. Select your keyframes and start by smoothing them and see if that does what you need it to do.

Hey Thomas
As Sander said, easing is when your animation is speeding up, slowing down, or acting in some way 'naturally". Without easing, your animation would be 'linear', meaning whatever parameter you animated, whether its position, rotation, scaling, opacity, what have you, is being animated at constant speed. Due to gravity and earthly physics, everything we see and perceive have some form of natural physics or easing involved. Like how a ball would bounce and how a car accelerates or decelerates and so on. Linear animation isnt bad, per se. Its just not natural due to physics and how our eyes perceive movement and behavior of objects.

So what your Adobe friends are referring to is the same concept - they are asking for a more natural motion or effect. You can ease in, ease out, or both, of your keyframes by going to the spline editor, select your keyframes and hit S. The easing is defined by bezier curves, so moving the handles will give you different speed and effect. You can easily play around with that and get some basic idea.

Since 'easing' is a very basic and very important concept in motion graphics, I highly recommend you look at some tutorials to get familiar with it. Its something you would learn on day 1 of any motion graphics program. And when in doubt, decelerate to come to a stop!

Regards
Sadi

I agree with the others, but want to add that linear animation is useful and important for some types of movement. For example, if you cut from one shot into another, and in the second shot, objects are already in motion, then linear keyframes are suitable. If you cut to a camera that's panning, or whip-panning, for instance, it will start with linear rotation. If you cut to a record player that's already playing, it will have a linear keyframe at the beginning. If the same record stops playing, it will decelerate gradually, and use a curve (ease).

Another example of where you'd use linear is for something that's flying into frame. Say you've got a title that you want to come on screen quickly. It could start from just off screen (top, bottom, left, even "over the shoulder") with a linear keyframe, and land with some sort of gradual deceleration -- smooth, sudden, springy, bouncy -- it's up to you.

If you start throwing the same kind of easing on everything, your animations quickly become mundane. Just like with good writing, it's important to mix up the structure of your motion to keep people engaged. There are several typical ways in which objects accelerate or decelerate. This page is a good reference for many of them. It includes graphs, video examples, and code snippets: http://www.motionscript.com/articles/bounce-and-overshoot.html. Resolve doesn't really do these kinds of curves unless you jump into Fusion, but Fusion is very capable.

Hey Jason, I completely agree. Linear animation is indeed useful, and I hope I didnt come across as saying that is was a bad thing categorically. In fact, I see a lot of people refer to linear animation as "boring", or writing it off. I personally dont agree with that. Personally speaking, I see animation curves as tools in my toolset, and I will use whatever tool I need to tell a story or convey a message through motion. I was talking about natural easing curves as perhaps what this person was looking for. Just my guess.

Animation curves is such a big topic, there is so much nuance to it. I like what you were saying about the different scenarios in which linear animation is the way to go! Thanks for sharing

Sadi