Is there a precise way to animate or edit the speed of camera movements?
I’ve animated a camera in two ways:
Direct recording of a camera flight, using a 3D-mouse. This is not ideal for two reasons: a) The system will be more and more bogged down as more keyframes are added, and b) as far as I can see, there is no precise way of editing the timing later on.
Following a path. This makes it easy to achieve an even speed and to make primitive changes to the timing, animating the offset values and adjusting the f-curves. But as far as I can tell, there’s no way to control the speed precisely (you’re not editing the speed, but the offset which is ‘floating’ and relative to the average length/time).
So is there a way to directly and precisely control the speed, like controlling the speed of a real dolly or crane?
Lets see, how about parenting the camera to what is moving? Say a moving car is going down the track and you need it to stay at the same pace. Emptys or Bones can help. Messing with the F-curves in the graph editor can help as well.
In this case, the camera isn’t parented to anything (it’s just exploring a scene on its own), so I suppose F-curves are the best way. They still don’t make much sense if you’re following a path, though.
Hi justavisitor,
Maybe a way to start to help you would be to understand precisely what you are looking to achieve.
How would you explain it with measure and timing to real cameraman?
I simply want as much control of all camera movements, including ease in and out, as possible.
But I think I’ve found a solution: My main problem with the #1 option above (direct recording of a camera flight, using a 3D-mouse, and then editing the F-curves) was the huge amount of keyframes you get when you use auto-keyframing. Editing takes a lot of time if you’ve got complicated camera flights and it’s not that easy to figure which keyframes you can delete without ruining the movements.
The large number of auto-inserted keyframes during recording still puts a lot of strain on the system, so the overall speed of the camera movements has to be decreased, which is rather counter-intuitive. But reducing the keyframes in a super fast, and yet surprisingly non-intrusive way, using the addon, makes it much easier to edit the F-curves.
Then again, it’s beyond me how it is possible to control the timing in any meaningful way if you use option #2 instead (following a path)… :spin:
I also added some key frame on the width of the camera, just for fun! but it really feels like I just did what you did in option 2 and that’s why it’s difficult to know what you mean by being precise.
Anyway, I’m glad that you found a solution that works for you!
Thank you for the .blend - it’s interesting to see how other people work.
Well, I think the problems occur if you, for instance, take a long flight around your portal and you have to subtly increase and decrease your speed at exact points, while your overall time must be in synch with an audio-track. But maybe it’s just me…