Subtitles of the Movie

If you're new to Motion, then this next lesson will especially be of help to you. Copying and pasting keyframes seems to be a little confusing so let me straighten things out a bit. In this project I have two gears. The red gear has no keyframes and is not animated in any way. The gold gear has keyframes, which make it move and grow across the screen. I'll play it. So the goal right now is to get this red gear to do exactly what the gold gear is doing and so we should be able to copy the gold gear's keyframes onto the red gear. I'll click on the red gear in the canvas and in the Keyframe Editor we see absolutely no parameters because the keyframe editor is set to show only animated values. You could set it to Show All and then Shift select both gears in the Layers Tab and now I can see both objects in the Keyframe Editor but man, that's a lot of scrolling around to have to do. I'll change it back to Show Animated and again, now only my gold gear appears in the list. I can click on a parameter in the gold gear's list like the X Position and that selects its curve. The next step is critical and is easy to miss. Right or Control click on a blank area of the canvas and the pop-up, which lets you copy the curve and its keyframes. Let's do that again. Do not put your cursor on top of the curve itself. Right clicking on a curve will give you a different pop-up menu. Great if I want to add a new keyframe, which I don't so make sure you right click on a blank area of the graph to get the Copy Paste Pop-Up. Now, we don't have the red gear in the keyframe editor yet so go to the Layers Tab or the canvas to select it. Right or Control click on the gear. A new pop-up appears and choose Paste. And the exposition curve and keyframes from the gold gear has successfully copied into the red gear. Let's do that again. This time I'll select all the curves from the list and click on an empty area in the graph and select Copy, select the red gear and again, right click and choose Paste. And the red gear jumps into the gold gear's position with all of the gold gear's keyframes this time as you can see in the Keyframe Editor. I'll undo a bit and get our red gear back to being unanimated. The gold gear's keyframes are not in memory, right? So I can Paste them again. But this time I'll move the play head forward, select the red gear and paste. And the red gear receives the same keyframes, just as before in the same temporal locations as before, regardless of where the play head is parked. I'll undo again and the red gear is back to having no animation. There's another way to copy keyframes and that is to select them all by dragging a box around them in the graph, right or Control click again, choose Copy, select the red gear again and paste. This time I'll just press Command V on the keyboard and now the red gear does exactly what the gold gear does but not at the same time. So copying from the selected curves in the list gives you the exact same animation with the same timings. In copying the keyframes themselves from the graph allows you to offset the spacing of the keyframes in time. You can, of course, Copy and Paste keyframes within the same object. Still using the red gear, I'll right click on this X Position Keyframe, choose Copy, move the play head and this time I'll right click my graph and select Paste and the keyframe is pasted at the current time. Cutting and pasting keyframes works the same way. So we've learned how to Copy and Paste keyframes with the Keyframe Editor. Can you do something similar in the timeline? The answer is a partial no. Even though the timeline shows us all the keyframes, it doesn't distinguish between parameters so that I can select one parameter but not another. But if I have copied keyframes in memory, I can use the timeline to select an object and Paste them. Motion knows in that case what parameters to paste the keyframes into. So basically you need to stay within the Keyframe Editor for the majority of your copying and pasting. This is why a large monitor or multiple monitors come in handy. Being able to have the timing pane open all the time is very helpful. I'll revert the project and now we're back to no animation on the red gear and I want to show you that there is an even simpler way to get all the gold gear's keyframes onto the red gear. If your intention is to copy all the animation from one object to another in one parameter or several, then life's pretty good because you can drag and drop animation from one object to another. Again, the Inspector is your best friend. I know that the gold gear moves and scales. Both of those parameters are in the Transform section of the gold gear's Properties Tab. If I select the word Transform and drag it onto the red gear in the Layer's Tab, there's my Plus Icon there again and with the word Transform along side of it, I'm going to release the mouse button, bam. The red gear now has the copied keyframes and as we can see in the Keyframe Editor. I'll undo that and move the play head forward and drag the Transform again from the gold gear to the red but this time the keyframes are pasted in the exact same time as the gold gear's. So this method of dragging and dropping is like the copying keyframes from the curves in the Keyframe Editor List. So no offsetting in time. All the parameters work the same way. I could have just selected Position or just Scale Only and dragged it from the gold gear to the red gear and only those keyframes would have pasted over. So we can drag and drop from the Inspector or use the Keyframe Editor for more precise placement in your copying and pasting.