The camera

The camera decides what your viewers see. Move it, zoom it and turn it, and key it like a figure, so the shot can follow the action. In this guide you make the camera push in on a punch.

Push in on a punch

Blue steps in and punches Red on frame 16. You keep the wide shot on frame 1, then move the camera close to the punch by frame 16, so the shot pushes in as the hit lands.

1. Select the camera. Click Camera at the top of the timeline’s layer list, or press Ctrl+K. The camera frame gets blue handles, the stage header says Scene › Camera, and Properties shows the Camera inspector.
2. Make a key on frame 16. Click the Camera row under the number 16 (the playhead jumps there), then press A or click Add frame. A gold dot appears: that is a key, a camera pose of its own.
3. Zoom in. Drag a corner of the frame towards the middle. The frame gets smaller and the shot gets closer: watch Preview and the Zoom field.
4. Aim at the punch. Drag the round centre handle (the one with a +) onto Blue’s fist. Or click Center to centre the shot on Blue.
5. Make it move. Double-click the gold key on frame 1 and choose Auto. New keys hold their pose and then cut (Constant); Auto glides from the first shot to the second.
6. Watch it. Press Space. Preview shows the camera pushing in as the punch lands. Press Space again to stop.

Try itCamera playground: push in on a punch

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1. Select the camera: click Camera in the timeline or press Ctrl+K.
2. Click the Camera row at frame 16 and press A.
3. Drag a corner of the frame inwards to zoom in.
4. Drag the centre handle onto the punch, or click Center.
5. Double-click the key on frame 1 and choose Auto.
6. Press Space and watch Preview.

Point at the playground first, so the keys go to it and not to the page. On a touch screen, tap Add frame instead of A and the play button instead of Space.

Select the camera

The camera is always there, even before you touch it: a dotted red outline on the stage shows the shot. By default it frames the whole scene at 100%. To edit it, select it in any of these ways:

• Click Camera in the Advanced timeline. Camera and Scene are the two rows above your layers, with a camera icon and a clapperboard icon.
• Press Ctrl+K. Press it again while the camera is selected to hide or show its handles.
• Search Camera frame in the command palette (Ctrl+P).

With the camera selected, the frame gets its blue handles and the rule-of-thirds guides, the stage header reads Scene › Camera, Properties shows the Camera inspector, and a Done button appears at the top right. Click Done, or Scene in the stage header, when you’ve finished. Choosing Scene or a figure layer hides the handles too.

Move, zoom and turn the shot

The camera frame has six handles. Each one does one thing:

Hover over a handle to see its value. Letting go makes one undo step. You can also type the values in Transform: X and Y move the shot in pixels from the centre of the scene, Zoom is the frame’s size and Rotation its tilt in degrees. Drag a field’s name left or right to change it (hold Shift for fine steps, Alt for extra fine). Enter keeps a typed value, Esc puts the old one back.

Animate the camera with keys

The Camera row works like a figure layer. A gold dot is a key: a camera pose. The grey bar after it is a hold: the frames that keep showing that key’s pose. Here is the one rule to remember:

1. Switch the timeline to Advanced and click the Camera cell where the move should start. Frame the starting shot (frame 1 already has a key).
2. Click the Camera cell where the move should end and press A (or click Add frame). You should see a new gold dot.
3. Frame the ending shot: drag the handles or type in Transform.
4. Double-click the first key to open Easing. Each key sets how the camera travels to the next key: Constant holds and then cuts, Linear moves at an even speed, Auto starts and stops gently, and Ease in, Ease out and Bezier shape the speed yourself. The bar between the keys turns violet.
5. Press Space and watch Preview. To make the move slower, put the keys further apart: at 24 fps, 24 frames last one second.

Auto key (K, or the Auto key button in the timeline header) makes a key at the playhead for every change on a held frame, so you can skip A. While it is on, the playhead turns red. To remove a camera key, put the playhead on it and press Shift+F6 (Clear key boundary).

A cut instead of a move: leave the first key on Constant. The shot stays wide, then jumps to the close-up on the second key’s frame, like a cut between two cameras.

The Camera inspector

Preview is a small live screen of the final shot: the camera keys, any camera motion and layer parallax together. It follows playback and the playhead, but not the canvas’s own pan and zoom. Its Guides button shows or hides the rule-of-thirds lines on the camera frame. Under Preview, Transform and Motion switch between the pose tools below and the camera moves.

Level turns the tilt back to 0°. Open Framing for the rest: Fit view, centre horizontally or vertically only (on the selected figures), and Match previous camera pose / Match next camera pose, which copy the pose of the key before or after without moving any key in time. Apply camera transform to figures moves, scales and turns the figures themselves so the shot looks the same, then resets the camera: use it when the figures should keep that framing. All of these are also in the command palette (for example Fit camera to view, Apply camera to figures).

Layer parallax

Parallax makes far layers slide slowly and near layers fast when the camera pans, which gives a flat scene depth. It is a setting of a figure layer, not of the camera.

1. Select a figure layer and switch on Parallax in Properties. Choose Distant (15%), Background (45%), Normal (100%) or Foreground (140%).
2. Move the playhead to a frame where the layer is placed right, and click Set reference from current frame. At that camera position the layer stays exactly where you put it.
3. For your own depth, type the X and Y responses (0–400%). Keep Link axes on to change both together.
4. Drag Pan under the layer’s preview to try the depth without adding camera keys, then play the real camera move in the Camera inspector’s Preview.

At 100% a layer moves normally, below 100% it moves more slowly (far away), above 100% faster (close up), and at 0% it doesn’t move when the camera pans. Parallax only changes how layers follow the camera’s movement: zoom and tilt still affect every layer the same way. Joined figures follow the layer of the figure they are joined to, so they never come apart.

Problems and questions

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