how to link manually animated channels?

[Gyuri]

Hi guys,

I had a project recently in which I animated a bunch of attributes by hand (there was no sense to use expressions).
Later I had to create shorter versions of this ad as well, but it was pretty much time consuming to slip/shorten all the channels separately.

Is there a way to link manually animated channels without any mathematical relation?
Just like when I move/stretch an axis’s main track the position.x will move/stretch as well.
I need the same, but for bunch of attributes (5 axis, 2 image, 3 geom etc.).

Thanks,

pH.

[Anonymous]

With a bit of care, adjusting the “scene” track will adjust the timing of every parameter nested within it.
Marcus

[shannones riders]

Thanks for your reply, but that won’t work as I need, because I do versioning. The original ad is 60sec and I have to do the 40, 30, 25 etc. sec versions. I put on the text elements in one action and I would like to use the same action at the shorter versions. (the animation of the text elements is the same in each version, sometimes little shorter)
Now I only have to slip/retime the track of each action and image. Normally it’s OK, but at this time there are sooo many and it’s easy to make a mistake.

[David Stewart]

I suppose you couldn’t render and timewarp the text elements then rekey them over your footage? If you don’t need to change animation timings this might work…

[bnw]

eval() is your bestest friend for this.

eval(expression, frame) returns the value of expression at frame. So if you go:

eval(Axis1.rotation, frame * 2)

You’ll get the rotation of Axis1 from double the current time. So that would give you your 30 from your 60, with the animation doubled in speed. For a 45, use frame * 1.333 and so on.

[shannones riders]

Thanks loops,

I am big fan of eval, but there is no mathematical relation between the channels.

I guess the feature I need simply doesn’t exist. Maybe I will post it as a request to the support forum.

I need something like the scene track. It should be like a “track container” and I could have more of this in one Action. I put in several channels into this container and later I can adjust the timing of the container’s content together.

Why would it be great?

Last time I had to finish a 60 sec ad in 5 different languages. I had text elements on the 4th, 5th, 8th, 11th shot and a packshot. Every text element was put on the screen in one Action.

One week later I was asked to make the 45sec, 30sec, 25 sec and 20sec version of the same TVC.

So I had to load the shorter version into the old Action and slip/shorten every channel matching to the new lengths. But there were tons of channels: every text element was animated&faded etc.

If I had a track container to each shot having text elements I only would have slipped/shortened this container.

Hope I described the idea clearly…:)

pH.

[bnw]

Yeah, I meant you could copy your original setup, then link every animated channel to the original with an eval(), but that would be a LOT of expressions to type if you have loads of animation 🙂

I guess if you had loooooads of versions to do it would be worth setting it all up with dummy axes for speed and offset, like eval(original_animated_axis.rotation, (dummy_speed_axis.pos.x * time) + dummy_offset_axis.pos.x). Then you could tweak those dummys around to retime and slip everything. Still a lot of typing, though 🙁

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