Noob with problems

[Alliat]

Hi, I just started messing around in Anime Studio Depute yesterday but I have a bit of experience in animation from way back.

Now what I'm trying to do is to make a music video for one of my songs. The opening scene is a view of a volcano with a glacier on top, clear blue sky and maybe some clouds puffing by. I've accomplished all this already, but then at about 14 seconds in I want the sky to begin turning red and the volcano to darken into a silhouette with the transition complete at 24 seconds. I can not for the life of me accomplish this.

No matter what I do the color transitions begin at the first frame instead of at 14 seconds. I've tried tricking ASD into placing dummy keyframes (keyframe when nothing has changed) at 14 seconds but still it begins fading at the first frame. I'm at a total loss here... I mean, I suppose I could let it just fade from the start, but it's not a very promising beginning of my relationship with this program...

-Entering my credit card info just to download a trial wasn't a good beginning either, but that's a different story.

[slowtiger]

You need to create a key at sec 14 with the same colour value as in # 0. It is a bit tricky, all keys with values (blur, opacity, colour) need to be made like that: first create the key at sec 24, then go back to sec 14 and create another key with the original value.

Since version 6 you also have to activate these effects first in the layer tabs.

[Alliat]

Ah! There it is! Thank you very much!

Would have thought this would have been made easier by the devs somehow. This is especially hard for me because the mountain has this light brown to dark brown gradient and I'm colorblind so trying to pick the exact same colors (or even close enough) again after they've darkened at 14 seconds takes a few tries. They should at least add an input value field for the colors. But this is a minor nuisance, so far I like this app very much.

[sbtamu]

You can use the eye dropper tool to copy a shapes parameters. Or you can look at the color pickers red, green, blue numbers and write them down for each part of the gradient.

[slowtiger]

You can always type in numerical values in the colour window.

Don't blame the developers, in every animation software you have to tell the programm when to start a movement - it can't read your mind.

But I think it should be possible to create a key in the colour (blur, opacity) timeline even when the value isn't different from # 0. After all it's possible for every movement channel.

[Alliat]

But I think it should be possible to create a key in the colour (blur, opacity) timeline even when the value isn't different from # 0. After all it's possible for every movement channel.

That's what I meant when I was talking about the devs. I've studied software engineering in Reykjavík University and a big part of that is designing user interfaces to make things as self explanatory and easy as possible. This particular issue could be solved by adding a drop-down menu above the timeline:

Add keyframe for...
-color
-movement
-opacity
-blur
-camera

Or something like that. But in the end I'm just glad this possible despite being somewhat hidden and tricky.

Good tip on the eyedropper, I had totally forgotten about that tool's existence.