Subtitles of the Movie

Whenever you animate an object in After Effects you will generate a motion path and this will happen automatically. What I'm going to do is move this car all the way over here and I'm going to resize it just a little bit. Of course I could have constrained that by holding down the shaft key but I just want to move this here for now and get an animation going for you. What I want to do now is hit P on my keyboard to open up the properties for the position and then I'm going to click the stopwatch to tell After Effects to put a keyframe on the current frame. Now I'm going to scrub my timeline to the end of the animation and I'm going to mov the car over here and as I mentioned earlier we have this motion path that shows up by itself. This tells us the starting point and the ending point. As you see I can move it at anytime to change the animation by myself, so the car starts there and I could stop it here. So its very flexible and a lot of people like to animate this way. All you want to do is set the keyframes and then you can put everything where you want to later on. But there's more, yes there is more. As long as the stopwatch is enabled I can scrub my playback and move the car or any other object and add points to this motion path automatically and each one of these can be manipulated. So I'm going to go ahead once again and manually scrub that and show you. I can move it here, I can click and drag to change the key frame position and I can also slow it down, speed it up, the closer they are together the faster the animation. Let me go ahead and just move that to the back and show you. How cool is that? It's smooth, it's nice and smooth and it goes faster. And I can once again do the same thing and move that there, hit spacebar so it goes really fast and slows down. Or I can manipulate these points manually. I can go up here and move them around to change the position. So up here we are dealing with position mostly and down here we are dealing with timing because this is the timeline. Another cool thing about these points here is they have handles. These are Bezier curves, so I can click and drag to add all kinds of easing and all kinds of loops and all kinds of great stuff. So I can click on any one of these guys and change how the animation plays back and we'll talk more about easing in and easing out and that kind of thing later on in upcoming lessons. But as you see you have full control over your animation and don't forget you can always hit the spacebar to preview your animation. By the way if you're not happy with one of the frames, click on it like so and press delete on your keyboard and now we have two points again and when I move it myself I can add more points. And that is pretty much how you use the motion path to not only add animation points but also to delete them, to change the timing and to change the look of your animation.