Speed Graph in After Effects

Download Project Files here.

Animate the Triangles

1. Shift-click on all the triangle layers.
2. With the Playhead at the origin, hit P for Position.
3. Hit the stopwatch next to Position on any selected layer to set a keyframe.
4. Move the Playhead to one second in, 0;00;01;00.
5. With all the triangles still selected, drag them upwards, so they’re at the top of their respective rectangles. Holding down Shift as you drag them will make sure their motion path is straight.

Add Eases

1. Deselect the triangles by clicking anywhere in the interface.
2. Select both of Easy Ease’s keyframes.
3. Right click on either selected keyframe.
4. Navigate to Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease.
5. Select both of Ease Out’s keyframes.
6. Right click on either selected keyframe.
7. Navigate to Keyframe Assistant > Ease Out.
8. Select both of Ease In’s keyframes.
9. Right click on either selected keyframe.
10. Navigate to Keyframe Assistant > Ease In.
11. Move the Playhead to the origin and hit Spacebar to play the animation. Note how there’s a difference in acceleration, while the timing is the same.

Custom Ease with the Speed Graph

1. If not visible, turn on Custom Ease’s visibility by hitting the eyeball icon next to its name.
2. Select both of Custom Ease’s keyframes.
3. Click on the Graph Editor icon, which is the first icon to the left of the Timeline itself. True to the name, it looks like a graph.
4. On the bottom line of icons on the Graph editor, hover your cursor over the graph icon. It should say “Choose graph type and options.”
5. Select Edit Speed Graph.
6. Go through the Graph presets by clicking each Convert Keyframe icon. Observe their effects on the Speed Graph curve.
7. Reset the curve by clicking “Convert selected keyframes to Auto Bezier.”
8. Each keyframe on the graph should have yellow bezier handles. Click and drag the inner handles until the curve resembles a peaked hill. The more gradual the hill, the more gradual the acceleration and deceleration. The steeper the hill, the sharper.
9. Hit Spacebar to play the animation and compare their speeds.

Video Transcript

Hey, everyone, this is Tziporah Zions for Noble Desktop, and in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to use the Speed Graph editor and Adobe After Effects. Today, we're going to be working with the Speed Graph to add custom easing to this triangle here.

And after going through like the default is easing, I'm going to show you how to get custom ease using the graph editor so you can see here's what the project looks like when we're done. So the thing is, the speed graph won't change the value of whatever properties you're editing, and it won't change how long the animation is either. But what it does do is add custom easing so you can control your object's acceleration and deceleration. So this is useful for when you have all your keyframes all set, but you want a more interesting look to the motion.

While there is a value graph, the speed graph offers more refined and accurate control, as well as being more straightforward once you get the hang of it. There are no external assets here, so you won't have to worry about that.

And yeah, with that, let's begin. So the first thing we're going to be doing is select all of these triangles, pay for position, had this little stopwatch and we're just going to be animating, you know, straight ahead, single line animation.

So I moved my plate hidden around 20 frames. Grab any of these. Select two keyframes, drag it up, hold down shift so they all move in a straight line. And they will go through moving in a straight line.

Very, very basic. And let's start adding our ISS. So you might be familiar with some of these, but we're going to go through all of these one by one. So no easy as the left mouse triangle. So that one, we're going to be leaving alone.

And easy is we're going to select both of these key frames right click on either little key frame and we're going to go to keyframe assistant plain old ISS. So, you know, like I said, the first triangle that's going to be for comparison, that one is we're leaving it alone.

But easy is what that one does, is it eases the speed coming in and out of the keyframes. So. You may not be able to tell just yet, but it'll be a little more obvious once we get a couple of more uses on these to show you the comparison.

The third triangle over here again, it's like both triangles, right-clicking on the selected triangle key from Assistant and this is our easy is out. So this one is of the speed coming out of the keyframes after the keyframes have been reached and the last one over here is the opposite.

Again, it's like both keyframes cue from the assistant season. And as you can guess, this one is the speed going into the keyframes. So let me show you what all the keyframes look like. So I've hidden the right-most keyframe for now, because that's the one that I want to use to add custom keyframes, too. But check it out now you'll notice that all the triangles reach the other end in the same amount of time. But you can see that every single triangle has a different acceleration. And you know, these are all important to know for if you want different kinds of looks to your animation.

But the last keyframe? Sorry, the last triangle is going to be modified with custom eases, and I'll show you how that's going to allow you to have a much more refined and custom personalized kind of look to the animation.

But you know these are pretty good for just right out of the box, and the last most one is it's plain, you know, it's just straight ahead. All right. With that, let's get into the customize one. So I'm going to select customers, I'm going to select my keyframes. And then this is the graph editor. So I'm going to click that and, you know, don't be scared. A lot of people get intimidated by the look this. But if you remember from grade school or wherever, it's just a graph.

There are only two values on the left side and the right side. Sorry, the left side and the bottom access the bottom side. So let's just make sure that we are in the speed graph. What we're going to be doing is let's head over to the graph icon here, and you can see that I'm already in speed graph. You might be seeing something else if you see these red and green lines, that's something else. We just want to be seeing that white line and it speed graph. And in order to get a bit more of look at it, I'm going to extend my view a bit.

And right now it's straight ahead and I want to again stress that this graph manipulates speed. It's not the value itself, it's not, you know, position, rotation, skilled, etcetera. It's it's the speed of those properties. So you can see that the left side, you may not be able to, you know, it's not labeled, but this left most side. If you're familiar with graphs, this measures the speed, you know how fast it's going or slow. And the bottom access is for time, and you can see that labeled like everything else in the timeline by the frames.

Now they're now the line itself now that represents the actual property we're animating, so in this case, it's going to be this is showing our position, this white line. Now, this might seem all abstract, but once we start animating, you'll see what I mean.

So I'm going to select my curve right here. And the graph editor comes with a couple of preset curves, and the shape of the curve affects how much the speed changes, with steep curves being sharper changes and smooth hills being more gradual.

So let's just work through these. So this is a hold, so it's not really that noticeable with a two-frame turn on the visibility. It's not as visible with, you know, just a two-frame animation, but a holds really just it doesn't interpolate - doesn't fill in the spaces between these keyframes.

It just, you know, one more when I'm here next frame, I'm right over here. We can change them to linear, which it's it's pretty basic. It's, you know, kind of what you'd see right out of the gate. If this were curved, you would set it right back to align, hence the name linear.

The third one over here is auto busy, and that gives us an automatic curve. So this there we go. Let's try to get it to auto busy. So auto busy day will give me these little handles here. And so this third option, auto busy.

Sorry, Audie. And so this third option convert selected keyframes to auto busier. What the does, basically if you select, you know, it doesn't always work. I just have these two keyframes here. But what this basically does is that it gives you like these little handles or it'll give you a nice smooth curve for your

animation and that will allow you to be able to animate it. Now the third option here is convert. Select the keyframes to auto busier, and I only have two keyframes here, so it's not really going to do too much for me.

What it typically does is turn your straight line here into a nice curve. I don't really have that much to work with at this point. For that to really give me an effect. But if you have a couple of keyframes and you hit it, then it'll make a nice, smooth, rounded curve for you over here.

But the very least does give me these handles that I'm going to be using later to animate a custom curve. So. And by the way, it also, if you don't want to just, you know, click right click and do the key from assistant thing you could hit, you know, easy ease for this kind of curve, and you

can see this actually mirrors the easy ease look of the other triangle. You can do the ease in and the ease out curves. Just remember to get everything selected uses out. You know, that's what that one looks like.

But you can see that the shape of this curve dictates what the, you know, the acceleration of my triangle over time. All right. So let's get this back to where we started and now let's manipulate these handles. So if you click on either one of these little points, that's going to give you this little yellow handle, and

by dragging it around, I can manipulate this curve so you can see that if I'm playing my animation and then, you know, the steeper I get this thing, the more extreme that's going to look like at the beginning.

And I highly encourage you to just sit on some keyframes and kind of go wild with, you know, this tool with this curve woo. But you see, as the animation starts heading towards the steeper and steeper curve, the values get crunched together.

And so it's speeding up, it's accelerating. And you can make some pretty wacky shapes with this. Let's see what that looks like. Well, it's kind of nice, but for our purposes, I'm sending it back to the original. I want it to accelerate and then slowly accelerate.

And for that. Remember, the acceleration has the curve going downwards. Acceleration is curve going upwards and I want it to be sudden. So I want this to be pretty much pointy. You know, I want to look extreme at one end.

So kind of like that it takes a little bit of a shifting, a little bit of patience, but let's play it. So it's a little bit too fast for my liking, so I'm going to pull this handle out.

Try it again. Still a little bit too fast. So I'm going to be pushing this value down, pulling the hill a little bit up, so it's not that extreme, even though I said, I want an extreme, OK, this is something I like a lot more. All right. So the speed graph ed is pretty powerful. It can be used on pretty much anything that can be framed. You can use it to give in your animation more subtle, interesting motion to rotation, scale, position effects, etc. And why can make your own custom curves in the editor?

You can also just use the preset curves if you're pressed for time, and it's a lot more depth and polished, otherwise simple animations. So that's all for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to use Speed Graph Editor.

So that's it for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to use the Speed Graph editor and Adobe After Effects. This has been Tziporah Zions for Noble Desktop.