Advanced Keyframing in Premiere Pro

Published on August 26, 2020

Tools

advanced keyframes, Animation, ease in, ease out, keyframes, spatial interpolation, temporal interpolation, text animation

Advanced keyframing

Keyframes are specific property points that we can assign values to. This way we can animate a specific property of a clip, like for instance it’s position or scale. We’ve already covered this in our basic keyframes tutorial.

But lately I kept on getting questions about the easing of keyframes, how beziers work and when to use them. So that’s why I decided to make this advanced keyframing tutorial.

spatial interpolation

When we right click on a keyframe we can change it’s spatial interpolation and it’s temporal interpolation. The spatial interpolation refers to the animation path. This means, when you click on the motion property you can see a blue box around your clip in the program monitor, you can use this to help you animate it. Once you’ve animated a property, like for instance the position, you will see a blue line, this is the animation path. If you place an extra keyframe you are able to drag this from your line, this will create an angle. You can then play your clip and the animation will move to that angle and then to it’s end position.

If you then right click on the keyframe and change it’s spatial interpolation to bezier the angle will become a smooth curve, this way the path will move less harsh and way smoother. So definitely use this whenever you animation paths needs to make some smooth curves.

temporal interpolation

Temporal interpolation is the way the keyframe itself behaves. Whenever we want to change the curve of the keyframe itself we don’t have to look in the program monitor, but we can click on the dropdown arrow in the effect controls panel. What we then want to do is ease to beginning and ending of the animation. We ease out the first keyframe, so it smoothly starts with it’s animation and we ease in the last keyframe so it smoothly stops. If we place keyframe in between those keyframes we can give those a bezier or auto bezier. This will automatically smoothen these as well.

With the levers you can play around with the speed of the animation, you can drag the beginning out so that it starts super slow and then goes fast in the end or vice versa.

Skillshare classes

If you want to learn even more advanced stuff about Adobe Premiere Pro, have a look at our Skillshare classes. We’ve made an advanced editing class for Premiere which covers a lot of editing tricks that you’ve probably never thought about. There’s also a whole segment about keyframes.