Using Keyframes in Avid Marquee Title Tool

By John on November 12, 2009 9:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Manipulating Keyframes in Marquee can sometimes turn into a complex process. Here is a quick tutorial to help simplify the process. If you are new to Marquee, I recommend that you read my Basic Marquee animation tutorial and then come back to this article. I’ve found it’s best to use Marquee’s animation mode to create a basic path, and then manually manipulate individual keyframes later.

Just about everything in Marquee is keyframeable. This makes Marquee extremely powerful when it comes to manipulating lights, colors, shadows, 3D distortion, and movement. The trick to manipulating keyframes is to simplify the process by only displaying the keyframe graphs that you need to adjust. Here are the steps to displaying keyframes in Marquee.

Before you begin working with keyframes, make sure you are working in 'Expert Animation Mode.' You can select 'Expert Animation Mode' from the toolset menu, or press F5 on the keyboard.

When you type a title in Marquee, it automatically becomes an object. Each object (or title) in Marquee has its own track within the timeline, and each track can be expanded to show a set of ‘curves’. Before you can add keyframes, you’ll need to make sure your object (or title) it selected by using the ‘edit cool’.

You can view keyframes inside a track when you are viewing the track’s curves. Click the ‘Show Curves Button’ to turn them on.

The ‘Show Curves Button’ is located in the bottom right corner of the timeline window.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky. You’ll also notice there is an expand button, and a collapse button.

Each glyph (or letter) within an object has its own track. This means you can key frame each individual letter within an object. Clicking the expand button will show an individual track for each glyph.

In the properties dialog box, check the curves that you want to display. The properties box should be off to the left of the timeline window.

Otherwise it will become confusing if there are too many curves displayed within the timeline window. In this example, I’ve turned on the rotation curves. Notice that only the rotation curves show up in the timeline window.

Each property may contain X, Y, and Z curves. You may want to turn on/off the curves you want to display.

If you’ve already created keyframes using Marquee’s animation mode, then you should see them in the timeline. You can also add additional keyframes by using one of them ‘add keyframe’ buttons.

You’ll notice there are different buttons for different types of keyframes which are for (position, rotation, scale, and color).

*You may occasionally run into an issue where you cannot see the entire curve. If a curve exceeds the maximum amount of vertical space available in your timeline window, you’ll need to resize the proportions of the timeline graph.

Notice how the keyframes aren't visible in the timeline below.

To fix this, activate any curve by clicking on it. Then hold down the shift + down arrow to decrease the amount of space required to display the entire graph.