(bright upbeat music)
- There're plenty of times
when a static camera shot is all you need.
There are even times
when having your camera stay completely still
is actually the most effective way to communicate your point
or tell your story.
But sometimes, a subtle camera movement
can bring your shot to life,
direct the audience's focus
or just add some visual interest to your video.
And if you're like me filming alone, most of the time,
it can be tough to add in camera movements.
Sure, you could use something like a motorized slider,
but that's not always practical or available.
And that's when keyframes come into play.
And speaking of sliders,
let's look at the opening shot
for my motorized slider review,
which I'm actually really proud of
I wanted to show the camera moving on the slider,
but I didn't realize until editing
how much better it would look
if the camera were moving and following the other camera
on the slider.
So I added a few keyframes to track the camera
and it totally brought this shot to life.
Now instead of just one static shot,
the camera kind of pushes in at the beginning
and then follows the movement of my camera
as it moves up the slider.
It's very subtle, but it added a really dynamic layer
to the opening of that video.
Excuse me while I drink my favorite beverage
with very little flavor subtle tea.
Because subtle tea, is key
when it comes to using keyframes.
This cup is empty, I just did it for that really dumb joke.
Before I show you how to do this within Final Cut Pro,
I do wanna explain the difference
in what it's gonna look like when you use keyframes
versus actual camera movements.
So, if you have your camera on a slider,
you're actually moving the camera through a scene.
So if you're pushing the camera on the slider
from here to here,
the scene around the camera is gonna physically change,
right, like if it's moving here,
it's gonna go past my computer, and past all this stuff
and and move in the environment.
If you're doing a keyframe kind of scale up
or a keyframe zoom,
you're just scaling up the existing image.
It's very similar to zooming on your camera.
But if you've used DSLR lenses,
you know that zooming on them is very tough to do smoothly,
they're just really not made for it.
In fact, there are a few things like this little device
that mounts directly onto your camera
and then gives you a bit more of a lever for doing zooms,
and it does help to do smoother zooms, I guess,
but it's still not perfect.
If you're trying to get that really subtle motion,
it's very tough to do and that's why keyframes
can really help with that.
So, here's the first example we can go with.
This is a shot of a waterfall
that I filmed when I went to Iceland A while ago.
And this is a static shot on a tripod.
The reason I didn't do a moving shot
was because I was using my travel tripod,
which doesn't really have a fluid video head
and so if you try to do moving shots,
they get all jittery and funky,
so I just did a static shot.
But this looks fine as is.
I think it would look really cool
if it kinda pan over a little bit.
So, one thing I'll have to do
is scale up the image a little bit
just so there's extra...
Like if I zoom out here, and I hit transform,
now you can see there's pieces of this frame
that go beyond the frame itself.
So that way, we're not just gonna see black,
we're gonna have, the image covering the entire screen
the entire time.
And the easiest way to add keyframes
is to click on your footage, press Ctrl + V,
and then that's gonna bring up all your video animation.
And then you can just sort of start,
right now we're just gonna do an X and a Y keyframe.
So I'm gonna keyframe it there,
move it over here, and I'm just gonna drag the X over
and I only want it to move that far
and now I can just move the keyframes
further apart
and when we play this back,
we're gonna have a little bit of camera movement.
And before I jump too far into this,
if you don't know what keyframes are,
they are literally the key frames
when it comes to animation.
That old school animation term, but essentially,
in your video editing software,
a keyframe, in Final Cut Pro,
they're marked by little diamonds,
that just tells the computer
that these settings need to be this way
at this point in time.
And so, if this keyframe is right here,
it's adjusting the position
and so the computer knows, Final Cut Pro knows
that these are the coordinates
that this shot needs to be positioned at,
at this point in the timeline.
If I go to the other keyframe, it's the same thing.
It's just telling it different coordinates
for a different time.
If I add in other keyframes or I do other things,
it's just changing,
It's just telling the computer what to do at those times.
And the cool thing with Final Cut Pro is
even though I'm talking about
how to add in subtle camera movements,
if you go through the inspector
and you go through settings and you add in some effects
anytime you see these little diamonds with a plus sign,
that means add a keyframe.
So, as you go through the program,
and you start playing around with it more
you'll notice, you can add keyframes for like everything.
And you can add Audio keyframes as well
to have audio effects come in and out.
If you wanna put an effect on a layer,
like if I added a blur to this,
but I don't want it to be blurry the whole time
I can use keyframes and basically right here
I can add a keyframe at zero,
here I can add a keyframe to, you know,
however much blur I want
and here, I can add a keyframe back to zero.
And now Final Cut is going to
freeze, force quit Final Cut.
Re-open Final Cut, there we go.
And now when I play it back,
you can kind of see the blur
goes in and out right here.
There's no blur, there's the full amount of blur
that I added and then no blur again,
just because of those keyframes.
I don't wanna get into effect keyframing right now
'cause that's a different video
I wanna stick with camera moves,
but as you're playing around,
just notice you can keyframe
pretty much everything that you do in Final Cut Pro,
which is pretty cool.
It is always important to be aware
of what your camera moves mean.
So in this case, basically I'm gonna have it go
in the other direction, from what I did originally.
And the reason for that is because
the water is flowing down the waterfall,
and now this camera move
is going with the current of the water.
So it makes everything kind of flow
the other way it went against that,
which sort of looked odd
'cause the water is moving this way,
but the cameras moving that way,
and it just sort of seemed a bit strange.
So you do wanna pay attention to your camera moves,
and you also wanna remember what your camera movements mean.
So here's another example,
if you watched my review on the aperture MC light.
Oh God, was just things just open in the background?
It was this light, forgot to put those on there,
looking like a wreck in here.
Okay, if you watch my review for that light,
I started with a lot of these shots
that were in front of a computer display
kind of showing colors and swirls and things.
And basically, as you can see, when I play it back,
I just had the camera sitting still,
the display was doing movement,
and the light was just sitting right there.
There's no other Motion taking place.
But if I do the same thing Ctrl + V,
and I can just keyframe it right here,
and then we can scale up a little bit.
subtlety is good,
subtlety is always good,
we could add a little Y movement
to kind of bring it in there.
Fun tip with Final Cut Pro,
when you're doing stuff like this.
In the player, if you click on View and show horizon,
it will put crosshairs on it
so you can line things up a little bit better,
which is nice.
And now, same thing as before,
I can spread those out so that the movement is slower
and now we've got our camera move pushing in,
which is really nice to introduce a subject
because again, going back to thinking about
what your camera moves mean,
if this is the start of a video
and I'm pushing into the subject,
that's a good way to introduce it
because we're pushing into the world,
we're entering the world of that thing.
If it's the end of the video, the opposite would be true
and it would make sense to Pull out from that subject.
So that way it feels like we're leaving
and we're going away.
So it's very important to pay attention
to what your camera moves mean.
The same thing is true for tilts.
If you tilt up,
it's kinda like you're going away from your subject
if you tilt down,
now, it's like you're introducing your subject.
And one other thing that I like to do,
especially for intro shots,
is instead of using built in transitions,
I just use keyframes on the opacity.
So, I'll start here with it, all the way down to zero.
And then I like slow fade in,
so then I'll put it all the way up to 100
and kinda see how that looks.
And now we've got, an almost like an even slower,
and now we've got this slow fade-in
as the camera is pushing in,
there's already movement in the background,
the fade and the movement of the camera,
were totally not there when we filmed that,
was all added in during editing.
One thing that's important to remember
if we go all the way to the beginning of the shot,
you'll notice that it's pretty wide,
you can even see some of the edge of the little table
that I had the light on there,
and that's because I knew that I would want to push in
for the shot.
So if you're using keyframes and you can plan ahead,
it's a good idea to just film everything a little bit wider
so that way it's gonna be easier to scale up
and move around within camera.
Sometimes you can't do that
like my example with the slider intro.
I didn't know I was gonna do those moves when I filmed
it still worked out okay though.
These are sort of examples without me in it.
So this is a video I made after our trip to Iceland
and Switzerland a couple years ago.
And the end of it, is Heather and I holding hands
walking near a lake in the Swiss Alps
because that is the fanciest sounding thing
I can think of.
During this shot, the camera is tilting up to the sky
because this is the end of our video.
Of course, it was just us filming
so this was that exact same technique.
We just set the camera down,
and then walked away in front of it which was nice,
we got to enjoy our nice like handheld walk by the lake
and then when I edited the video,
I just threw in some keyframes
to have the camera kind of tilt up
give that visual interest
and also since we are tilting up,
we're seeing more of the landscape, we're seeing the sky,
and that shows you
that is probably gonna be the end of the video.
So, just be sure you're always paying attention
to what your camera moves mean
when you're adding them in with keyframes.
And you should be doing the same thing
when you're filming in real life anyway,
don't just have crazy camera moves for no reason.
Think about what all this movement actually means
psychologically and emotionally to your audience
and to your viewer.
Now as I mentioned before, subtle tea is key
when you're doing this kind of thing.
You don't want the moves to be super noticeable
unless you're going for something crazy stylized
and you don't necessarily need to do it in every shot ever,
it's just once in a while, it's a nice little trick
to pull out of your tool bag,
add to a video and make it that much better.
And just for the sake of clarity,
I am using Final Cut Pro
which is my favorite video editing software.
But if you're using anything that's slightly more advanced
pro level software, Premiere, DaVinci Resolve,
any of that kind of stuff.
You have have the ability to use keyframes,
the way that you implement your keyframes
might be slightly different,
but the techniques you use
to make your keyframes act as a camera operator
are gonna be exactly the same.
But if you wanna know more about editing techniques
and become a Final Cut Pro Pro,
put together this whole playlist right here
of some Final Cut Pro tutorials
that I have put together
and then we're gonna go to an end screen
where you're gonna see I used keyframes
to make the picture kind of move across the frame
and look a little more dynamic.