Animating video items, and retiming a clip

Everything on this page is something an item does over its own length — travelling across the frame, spinning, growing or fading as it plays, throwing off copies of itself, falling or bending, and for a clip, changing speed part-way through or having its camera shake smoothed out. Every item on the timeline animates the same way: a clip, text, a shape, an emoji, a table, a placed image, a drawing, a mask, a caption and a group all take the same movements. It all lives in the item's own settings along the bottom of the timeline editor: pick the item first, and the tabs are there.

Animate any item over time

Instead of one fixed value for a whole item, you can have it change as it plays — and the item doesn't need to be moving footage: a still picture, a word of text or an emoji spins, floats and travels just as a clip does. An item has one animation, and every item's Animate menu is the same strip of cards: Presets are whole animations, each naming how the item arrives, what it does while it is there and how it leaves; Starred holds the animations you starred, and the copies you starred wherever the item can hold them; Path is where the item travels; Repeat draws it as copies of itself; Deform bends its picture; and Automate opens the place where any setting rises and falls over time — it works even on an item that carries nothing else yet. Once the item has an animation, the container at the menu's right end names it, with Remove and Recipe under the name. Recipe opens every setting of it in one place: Arrive, Animations, Path, Leave and, on a clip, Speed, then Follow, Emit, Physics and Deform, each where the item can use it. It opens on View: Applied, which shows what the animation uses; press a section's name on the left to go to it, or press View: Applied for View: All. An item with no animation yet reaches the Recipe through the Deform card, which opens it straight away. The Path, Repeat, Deform and Automate cards open their tools rather than replacing the animation, and each wears a small mark while the item carries one. An item's copies are not part of its animation: they are a layer of their own in the same container, named Repeat, with their own Recipe.

A caption's tabs are Captions, Effects, Animate, Border and Transform — its words and their look, its effects, its movement, its edge and where it sits. With one of its captions picked, Animate offers the presets that are an arrival and an exit, and its Recipe holds only Arrive and Leave, for that caption alone. A privacy cover is the one item with no Animate menu: a cover that fades or moves would show what it hides.

Path — draw the route an item travels

Select the item, open Animate and press the Path card: the preview is ready to draw on straight away, and until a path exists a hint on the item says to press and drag across the preview. Draw the route the item's centre travels, and the path becomes part of the item's animation. Drag a point on the line to move it, add points along the line, and delete ones you don't want. Press the Path card again to put the line away.

Everything else about the path is in the Path section of the Recipe, not on the preview:

• Draw motion path opens the line on the preview, lit while it is showing, and Motion path chooses whether you are editing the line's Shape or its Timing.
• Line shape — slide from sharp, angular corners to round, smooth curves through the points you drew.
• Redraw throws the line away so you can draw a new one.
• Record draws the route with your hand: press it, then press and hold the item and move it. The video plays while you do, and the route and how fast you moved become the path, which edits like one you drew.
• Ease sets how the item travels between the path's points: Smooth, Hold or Spring.
• Rotate to follow path turns the item to face the direction it's travelling.
• Timing — add frames along the path to say when the item reaches each point, and Even out speed spaces the travel evenly instead of racing the straight stretches.

To remove the path alone, press Remove beside Redraw. The Remove under the animation's name takes the whole animation.

Automate — change any setting over time

Select the item, open Animate and press the Automate card at the end of the strip — it is there even before the item carries any animation, and it wears a small mark while any setting is automated. While you are working in the Effects menu, the automate mark at the right end of its named layer's row goes to the same place. Pick what to drive from the list at the top: the item's own Position X, Position Y, Scale X, Scale Y, Opacity and Rotation come first — plus Tilt X and Tilt Y on an item whose Transform menu offers a tilt (not a blur, a mask, a group or a 3D model) — then Turn X, Turn Y, Skew X, Skew Y and Depth, then what the item itself holds, such as a text's Size and Letters or a shape's Stroke and Round, then every setting of every effect the item carries — a filter's strength, a weather look's density, a grade's contrast, an edge's or a mark's numbers, and the Controls of an effect someone wrote, such as one drafted with AI — named by the effect and the setting (a control by the name its author gave it), then each movement it plays — its Intensity, its own Time, and every part it moves, listed under the movement's name — and the numbers of its Repeat copies, such as Count, Step across and Turn, and of the sprites it throws off, such as their Speed, Gravity and Wind, and last every handle pose of a bent picture. An arrival or exit that blends with what is beneath is listed too, under its edge and its Style — Arrive · Zoom, say, or Leave · Shatter — with the settings that can change as it plays: its Angle, a wipe's Centre X, Centre Y and Scale, the cells' Tiles or Slats, Spacing and Jitter, Zoom's Leave scale and Arrive scale, Dissolve's Slices and Colour split, Shatter's Pieces and Flight, and Warp's Ripple, Ripples and Phase. A setting that is a point on the picture — a light's source, a Depth look's lamp, a warp's centre — is two lanes, its X and its Y, and each can follow a source of its own. A weather look's list holds its Time lane, the weather's own clock — a flat stretch freezes it, a steeper one speeds it up and one that runs downward plays it backwards — and leaves its speeds out, because a speed changed mid-play would make every particle jump: drive the Time lane instead. Any other look that moves on a clock of its own has a Time lane too, a film look whose grain re-seeds among them; a mist or rays drawn by depth hold still, so they have none. The item itself has a Time lane of its own whenever one of its looks moves with time — a film look's grain, a glitch, a weather field — and it times all of them at once: a flat stretch freezes them, a steeper one rushes them, and set to follow a sound it makes them rush on the beat without ever jumping. A look's own Time lane still wins over it, and the item's movements keep their own time. A shape cut is in that list too, by its Size, Horizontal and Vertical — the three you normally set by dragging its grips on the picture — so the silhouette can travel or grow as the clip plays even though those have no slider of their own. The two tilts are the same: they are the lean you otherwise give the clip with its perspective control on the picture, so a curve on either leans the clip in perspective as it plays. The lane shows the setting's value across the clip's length, with a dashed line at its current value and Now: reading it out.

• Press the lane to add a point, and keep dragging to place it in one move; drag any point to move it in time and value.
• Select a point and drag the handles either side of it to bend the curve between straight lines and smooth curves.
• Double-click or right-click a point to delete it, press and hold it on a phone, or select it and press Delete.
• Ease — select a point and a row shows its Ease, At and Value. Ease says how the stretch after that point travels: Linear, Smooth, In, Out, In/Out, Hold, which stays put until the next point, Overshoot, which runs past the next point and settles back, Spring, which rings into it, its Period and Bounce on a row beneath, and Ball, which lands on the next point like a dropped ball and bounces back up off it, never past it, its Rebound saying how high. At and Value let you type its time and its number exactly.
• Value and Speed — the corner of the curve's box switches between the value over time and how fast it is moving. In Speed, drag a point up or down to set how fast the curve passes through it.
• Repeat — once a lane holds two points, the Repeat word beside the setting's name turns them into one cycle across the item's whole length, before and after them — a gust every three seconds is a few points, not forty. Loop starts each pass again, Back and forth plays every other pass in reverse, Climb starts each pass where the last one ended, and Keep going runs on past the points at the speed they ended on. Repeat from this key, on a selected point, plays what comes before it once as an intro and loops from there. Trimming the item's start leaves what plays exactly as it was.
• Cleanup tools — Simplify Points thins a hand-drawn curve down to the points that matter, Smooth Curves rounds every corner, and Clear automation lane removes the curve so the setting holds its plain value again.

Make a setting follow the sound. Open Source beside a setting's name, choose Follow sound, and it moves with your video's audio instead of a curve. At rest is its value in silence and On the beat its value on a full beat. Band picks the part of the sound it listens to, and Reacts to picks which sound when your video has several. A look brightening on the kick, a weather effect's Amount swelling with the music or a mark growing on the snare all work this way. On a Time lane the two values are speeds, so a weather or a look moving on its own clock rushes on the beat and never jumps. If you delete the sound, the setting follows your whole soundtrack.

Let something else drive a setting. Source offers more than a curve. Noise wanders between its Low and High, and on the item's own place, size, turn, opacity and settings, its bend's Strength and its copies, Wave swings between them, its Shape a Sine, Triangle, Square or Saw; Rate sets how fast each one goes. Subject follows something you have tracked in the clip — press Attach on its row, or on a tracked person's Face row to read their face alone — and Reads picks its Speed, how far Across or Down it stands, its Size, or how it faces: its Tilt in the picture, its Turn left and right, or its Nod up and down, so a setting can follow a head as it turns. Another setting follows a different setting on the same item, picked under Setting. A curve that Smart Edit wrote from your words reads Written by AI here, and choosing any other source replaces it.

Shape what a lane reads. Whatever a lane follows — a sound, a noise, a wave, a subject or another setting — the rows under Reading change how it is read before its two values. Read takes its Value, or its Speed, how fast it is changing. Hold steps it a set number of times a second instead of moving smoothly. Follow smooths it: Rise is how fast it climbs, Fall how fast it drops back, and Bounce lets it spring past and settle, falling as it rises. Response reshapes it on a curve, so a quiet stretch can count for nothing and a loud one for everything. On a Time lane following a sound only Follow, Rise and Fall are offered, so the clock never jumps.

Set keys as you work. Each slider has a small mark at the end of its row: press it to add a key at the playhead, or to take away the one you are on. Once a setting has a curve, its slider reads the value at the playhead and moving it sets a key there. Dragging an item on the picture keys its position the same way wherever it has a curve, and on a clip its size and turn too. A slider driven by a sound or a signal reads Auto; press it to open what drives it.

Each automated setting draws its own strip under the item on the timeline, with its keys on it: press a key to jump to it, and drag it to change when it lands. Select the strip and its trash can removes the curve. Everything here animates live as you play, so you can fine-tune the motion in context, and it exports exactly as you see it.

Add motion to an item

Motion is ready-made movement — no keyframes to place. Select any item, open Animate in the bottom bar and pick a card: each is a whole animation, how the item arrives, what it does while it is there and how it leaves. There are more than seventy, in six sections: Presets holds the everyday ones such as Pop, Fade and Slide, Text holds the cards made for text you've added, such as Typing, Letter flip and Stomp, Transitions holds the cards that only arrive and leave, Lively keeps the item moving, Cinematic holds it the way a camera would, and Playful gives it some bounce and weight. A card shows only on an item that can play it. Pressing another card replaces how the item arrives, moves and leaves — asking first when you have tuned it, so dialled-in work is never lost by accident. Everything else it holds stays where it is: a drawn path, its copies and sprites, a fall, a bend and a clip's speed ramp. Change anything from Recipe: the container then reads how many settings you changed, as +2. Remove takes the whole animation off; a clip's speed ramp stays until a second press.

To write an animation from a sentence instead, use Animate an item in Smart Edit.

In the Animations section of the Recipe, Style picks the movement and Add animation adds another to run with it. The movements:

• Ken Burns — a slow zoom.
• Drift — a slow pan that leaves from where the item stands and travels about a third of the frame.
• Float — a gentle vertical bob.
• Sway — a slow rotational rock.
• Breathe — a soft scale pulse.
• Spin — continuous rotation.
• Turn — swings round in 3D, its face catching the light as it turns.
• Orbit — travel around a circular path, starting at rest from where the item stands.
• Punch — a scale spike, for a hit.
• Shake — a jitter that turns and zooms as it moves, and decays away.
• Handheld — the slow drift of a camera held by hand.
• Impact — a sharp zoom that rings and settles, for a landing.
• Wiggle — a quick, playful rock from side to side.
• Strobe — flashes on and off.
• Squash — stretches and squashes as if it had weight.
• Swing — rocks from its top like a hanging sign.
• Tumble — rolls over in 3D, end over end.
• Hop — small jumps that land and go again.
• March — on a shape or a drawing, runs the dashes of a dashed line along it.
• Beat — grows on each beat of your soundtrack and dims between beats.

Each item spins, grows and turns about its own centre — a small picture-in-picture clip turns in place rather than swinging round the middle of the frame. Pivot X and Pivot Y, in the Animations section, move that point, in pixels of the frame from the item's centre, so a sign can swing from its top edge. Each movement you add draws its own strip under the item, and it does not have to run the item's whole length: drag the strip's ends to choose when the movement plays, and it eases in and out by winding its strength up from nothing and back down again rather than snapping on. Click the strip to open the item's Animate menu with that movement picked, and press Recipe on its card to open the movement's own settings in place of the cards; its two fades are its Timing section, each its length and, once it has one, its Ease — Linear, In, Out or In/Out — as a look's and a border's fades are, and where and how long it plays is the strip itself.

Intensity sets how strong the movement is, from off at 0% up to double at 200%. Driven by chooses what paces it: Time runs it off the item's own clock, while Beat ties its strength to your video's soundtrack so it moves with the music — pick which frequency band drives it (bass for the kick, treble for hats), which sound to listen to when your video has several, and, under Reading, how smoothly it rises and falls. On Beat, the movement rests whenever the music does, so an item in a video with no sound yet sits perfectly still. Speed sets how fast the movement repeats. On every starts the movement over at each beat of your soundtrack, or on a caption at each spoken word, and says how many fall inside the item; Off lets it run on its own clock.

Not every setting applies to every movement, so you'll only see the ones that do. Spin has no Beat option — its rotation builds up continuously, and tying that to the music would wind it backwards. Ken Burns and Drift have no Speed, because each one completes exactly once across the item however long it is.

Every movement has its own feel as well. Reverse runs it the other way, Phase starts it further through its cycle, Angle sets which way it travels, Axis sets which way it turns in 3D, Ease sets how it starts and stops (on Spring, with its Period and Bounce; on Ball, with its Rebound), and Seed gives a random movement a different path. A movement starts later by its strip on the timeline, and Stagger sets where each of several items starts. Ken Burns can move from one framing to another with Start zoom and End zoom and their X and Y. Steps holds each pose for a moment, for the hand-drawn look of animation On twos, On threes or On fours.

Tune each part of a movement. Under its settings, a movement lists the parts it moves — its Rotation, its Position Y and so on, each named — and each part has its own Amount, how far it goes, and where it cycles its own Rate and Phase; a jittering part also takes Fineness, From rest and Pulse, and a Punch its Wind-up. Changing one part changes that part alone, while Intensity and Speed still scale them all, and each row marks what you changed from the card. Each part is also a lane in Automate, listed under the movement's name, where it can follow a curve you draw across the movement, a sound, a noise or a wave instead.

You can run several motions on one item — a slow Breathe plus a Punch on the beat, for example. Three or four at once is plenty; past that they start fighting each other. Motion plays live as you edit and never needs a preparing step, and it exports exactly as you see it.

Motion blur comes by itself. Anything moving fast blurs the way it would through a camera's shutter, a clip, text, a sticker or a caption alike, while you play as well as in the export, and it has no setting to tune. With many items moving at once, some may play sharp until they are prepared; a paused frame and the export always show the blur whole.

Choose how an item arrives and leaves

The Arrive and Leave sections of the Recipe are the one place an item's entrance and exit are set — a clip's, a drawing's, a caption's or a group's alike. Style picks either from what the item can take, and None clears that edge. An item takes one per edge. The blends — Fade, Push, Dissolve, Morph, Black, Whip, Cube, Flip, Page, Warp, Clock, Radial, Zoom, Film Burn, Ink Bleed, Smear, Old TV, Tiles, Blinds, Shatter, Match Cut and, on a clip, Depth — mix the item with whatever is already on screen, so they double as the way one clip hands off to the next. The gestures — Pop, Bounce, Slide in, Spin in, Flip in and Roll in — move the item itself, settling with a springy overshoot rather than a flat stop; Slide in moves only the item, where Push moves the whole picture. Text you've added also takes Typing, Scramble and Count up, and a shape or a drawing takes Draw on, which draws its line as it arrives. Slide in, Roll in and the directional blends also ask which way they travel, on an Angle row: any angle on Slide in, Roll in, Page and Ink Bleed, and Left, Up, Right or Down on Push, Whip, Cube and Flip. Set how long it takes with Duration, and how long it waits with Delay. A gesture that moves the item has one Ease for how it settles, resting on that gesture's own feel until you pick another — a Spring with its Period and Bounce, or a Ball, which lands and bounces like a dropped ball, with its Rebound — and a blend may add settings of its own: Edge softness on Black, Clock and Radial, the last two with a Centre X and Centre Y as well; Leave scale and Arrive scale on Zoom; Slices and Colour split on Dissolve; Pieces and Flight on Shatter; Ripples and Phase on Warp; Scale on Film Burn and Ink Bleed; Spacing and Jitter on Tiles and Blinds. Each step of a gesture has its own Amount, where it moves from — how small a Pop starts, how far a Slide in travels — and a Draw on has Fill from, where in the drawing its fill starts to come up. Scramble also takes Steps, how many times a second its letters change. A gesture chosen as the Leave plays its arrival exactly backwards. A transition draws nothing on the timeline — this section is the one place you see and change it.

Stagger several items. Select two or more animated items and press Stagger in the timeline's bar. Pick an order, first to last, last to first, from the centre, from the edges, left to right or random, and each item arrives, moves and leaves on its own turn. Step sets how far apart the turns are.

Move the letters, words or lines inside an item

An arrival, an exit or a movement can run through the parts of an item in turn instead of moving it whole. Open Animate, then the Recipe, and under a Style in Arrive, Animations or Leave, set By. Text goes by Line, Word or Letter, a caption by Word, a drawing by Stroke, and an item with copies by Copy; Whole moves it as one. An arrival or exit offers By on a gesture or a Fade, because the other blends work on the whole picture.

• Order picks who goes first: First to last, Last to first, From the centre, From the edges, Left to right or Random.
• Spacing sets how far apart the parts run: at 0% they all go at once, at 100% one after another with no overlap.
• Shape, on a movement, is a curve of how much each part takes across that order. Even, Rise, Fall, Hill, Valley and Random are ready-made forms of it, and it reads Custom once you reshape it.
• Size, Fade and Turn give the parts their own size, fade and turn along the order, held whatever the animation does: the last part takes the amount you set, and the ones between follow a straight rise you can bend.
• Curves picks which of those — the Shape, Size, Fade or Turn — the graph beneath draws, and dragging the graph reshapes it.
• Jitter makes the parts uneven: its Offset, Turn, Size and Fade each set how much the parts differ in that way, and its Seed picks another unevenness.
• Ramp, on a caption's words moving by Word, sets how softly each word's movement comes up and goes as it is said.
• Tint is a colour a part wears away from rest. Arriving, it lands in the item's own colour; on a movement, it takes as much of the tint as its Shape gives it.
• Seed appears when anything is Random, and picks a different shuffle.

The Text cards are ready-made versions of this, such as Letter pop, Baseline and Merge, and each opens in the Recipe like any other. Typing, Scramble and Count up work through the text in their own way and take no By.

Repeat an item as copies

Repeat draws an item as a row of itself, each copy stepped from the last. Select the item, open Animate and press the Repeat card: its Recipe opens on the copies' settings, and raising Count, which counts the item as one, puts them down. From then on the copies are their own Repeat layer in the container at the menu's right, beside the animation, with Remove and Recipe; removing the animation leaves them. The steps build up, so a Turn of 30° fans twelve copies into a full circle. The most copies you can set depends on your device.

• Layout stands the copies in a Row, in a Grid or along the item's Path. A grid takes Rows, how many rows it holds, and Row across and Row down, where each row stands from the one before; along a path, Spacing sets how far apart they stand in the item's own size, and below zero they go ahead of it.
• Step across and Step down move each copy from the one before.
• Turn, Scale and Fade are what each copy adds to the one before.
• Pivot across and Pivot down set what the copies turn and scale about.
• Turns with copies turns and scales each copy's step along with the copies before it, so the row winds into a spiral; off, every step points the same way and a Turn fans the copies out.
• Copies in front stands each copy over the one before; off, the item stands over them all.
• Time step, on a clip, plays each copy that far behind the one before, as an echo of the clip's own past. The copies share one second of the past between them, so the slider stops where the last copy reaches a second back — the more copies, the shorter the most it allows — and adding copies past that shortens the step to fit. A paused frame shows it at once; while you play, the copies stand on the current moment until their prepared file lands.
• Curves shapes how the copies' size, fade and turn build from the item to the last copy of a row, and Jitter makes them uneven — its Offset, Turn, Size and Fade each how much, and its Seed another unevenness.

Every number here but Time step, Curves and Jitter also takes a curve in Automate, so the row can grow, fan out or fade as the item plays.

Copies you tuned can be starred: the star is first in the Repeat layer's Recipe row. Starred copies are offered on the Animate strip of any item that can hold them — a Time step only on a clip, a Path layout only on an item that travels a path — and land whole, their curves with them, asking first over copies the item already has.

Copies are parts of the item like letters: once it has them, By offers Copy, so an arrival or a movement runs along the row. With Order on From the point, it runs out from the place you set with Point across and Point down, so copies nearest that point go first.

Throw sprites off an item

Emit makes an item throw off small copies of itself: a burst of stars from a star, a trail behind a moving sticker. Select the item, open Animate, then the Recipe, go to Emit and raise Count, how many fly at once; the most depends on your device, and back at 0 it stops. Each sprite leaves from where the item stood when it was born and the item goes on without it, so a moving item leaves a trail. New ones stop one Life before the item goes, so the last die as it does.

• Life is how long each lives.
• From is where they are born: Middle, Inside, Edge or Along its way.
• Picture is what each sprite is: The item itself, a sprite from the library, or a picture of your own.
• Speed, Direction and Fan set how fast they leave, which way, and how wide a fan.
• Gravity and Drag pull them down or up and slow them; Wind drifts them sideways, and Turbulence bends each one's path as it flies.
• Pull gathers them toward a point by the end of their life, the point set by Pull across and Pull down from the item's centre.
• Size, End size, Fade and Spin set how they look from birth to death, and Curves draws how their size, fade and pull change across a life, on one graph.
• Jitter makes them differ — its Speed, Size and Turn each how unevenly — Burst bunches their births together, and Seed picks different sprites.
• In front of the item stands them over it, and Hide the item leaves only the sprites.

Make an item fall, bounce and swing

Falls drops an item from where it stands, so it bounces and settles on a floor. Select the item, open Animate, then the Recipe, go to Physics and turn on Falls. The result becomes ordinary curves on the item's Position X, Position Y and Rotation, which you can fine-tune in Automate until you next change a Physics setting or move the item, when it falls again from its new place. Turning Falls off takes those curves away.

• Gravity sets how hard it falls, and below zero it rises. Bounce is how much speed it keeps off what it hits, Friction how much a surface grips it, and Drag how fast the air slows it.
• Floor sets where the floor stands, and Sides of the frame stop it keeps it inside the frame.
• Throw, Throw direction and Spin give it a push at the start.
• Hits names other items it collides with, up to eight. One that doesn't fall itself stands still.

Swings, in the same section, is for a shape or a drawing: its lines sway like hair, a hung cloth or a tail, held at one end, and they lag behind as the item moves. Stiffness is how firmly it keeps its drawn shape, Damping how soon it stops swinging, Droop how much it hangs, and Wind how hard it is pushed, in gusts: Gust rate sets how often they come and Gust seed which gusts it meets, so two swinging items don't gust in step. Held by its far end hangs it from the other end.

Turn a shape into another shape

Select a shape, open Animate, then the Recipe, and in Animations pick what it becomes under Morph to. It changes across its whole life; Morph starts and Morph ends set the part of its life the change runs over. For exact timing, add a Morph to curve in Automate, which takes over how far along it is. Only a shape can morph.

A shape's own settings animate too. Open Automate and its list holds its Stroke, Round where its corners can round, Dash offset on a dashed line drawn without a brush, on an outline drawn with a brush that brush's Spacing, Density, Scatter, Turn amount, Fade and Fade range (its Turn and Pattern are set, never curved), and the settings that make its outline: a star's, a plus's, a clover's or a polygon's Points, Tip, Turn and Waist; a rectangle's, a triangle's, a trapezoid's, a parallelogram's or a banner's edges — Top width, Top center, Top notch, Base width, Base center and Base notch; an ellipse's Squareness; and each dot that shapes any other shape, such as an arrow's Head length.

Bend an item's picture

Select an item, open Animate and press Deform: the Recipe opens, and its Deform section holds four tools. Press a tool's row to put its handles on the preview, and press it again to put them away.

• Mesh lays a grid over the picture. Drag any crossing to bend it, and set the grid's cells with Across and Down.
• Liquify is a brush. Drag across the picture to push it, with Brush size setting its reach.
• Pins drops a pin wherever you tap the picture, up to 32. Drag a pin to move that part while the rest stays as rigid as it can. Press a pin to pick it, and its delete mark appears.
• Bones places a joint wherever you tap the picture, up to 32, each hanging from the one before. Drag a joint to turn its bone. Press a joint to pick it and delete it; press it again to let go, and your next tap starts a new line of bones.

Moving a handle sets a key for the whole pose at the playhead: one key is a bend that holds, and a second elsewhere plays the move between them. Each pose has its own curve in Automate, named Mesh, Pins or Bones. A Liquify brush holds one bend, so bring it in and out with Strength, which sets how much of any bend shows and takes a curve of its own. The mark at the end of a row takes that tool's work away. A bent item exports exactly as you see it, a group included.

By depth, in the same section on a clip or a group, walks the picture past its subject from one side to the other across the item's life. Raise it to set how far, and Direction sets which way. A clip first reads its own depth, with the progress on its timeline row; a group uses the distances of its members. It lands as a Depth look on the item's Effects, where it can be tuned like any look.

Shape text as it plays

Text you've added can change its letterforms over time. Its Text tab holds the settings, and their numbers are also on the Automate list, so they can rise and fall as the video plays.

• Weight and Width appear on a font that can vary smoothly: Roboto Flex has both, Inter Variable has Weight.
• A long shadow is the text's Border Shadow: Shadow tail draws the words out away from the light, its Light from, in its Shadow color, and Tail fade fades it along its length.
• Size, Letters and, where the text has them, an outline's Stroke, Gradient tilt and Slide, and its bubble's Points, Waist or Squareness, take a curve the same way.

Lay text along a line. Press the Path card and draw a line for the text, then in the Recipe's Path section turn on Text along the line. The letters lie along the line instead of the text travelling it, and Along line slides them along it. Add an Along line curve in Automate and they run along it as the video plays. While it is on, the path's timing rows stand aside: Motion path, Ease, Rotate to follow path and Even out speed.

Pin an item to something moving

Text, an emoji, a shape or a picture can follow something you have already tracked in the video. Open Animate, then the Recipe, and in Follow press Attach on its row; on a tracked person, the person's row follows the whole person and the Face row beneath it their face. The item stays where it is now and moves with the subject from here. Size makes it grow and shrink with the subject, and Turn makes it turn with the subject, both about the subject, so a label held beside a face stays beside it. Turn appears only where the video knows how the subject turns: a face or a marked surface. The list appears once the video holds something tracked. A mask follows from Tracking on its own Mask tab.

Move with another item. Any item can follow another single item, though not a group. In Follow, pick it under Item. The follower keeps its own place and takes on the other item's moves; Position starts on, and Size, Turn and Opacity add those, a size or a turn swinging it about the item it follows. Lag runs it up to two seconds behind, for a trail. It takes the moves alone, never how the other item arrives or leaves. A link is one step: an item that follows cannot itself be followed, and an item being followed cannot follow another.

Save an animation to reuse it

Once an animation differs from the preset it began as, its Recipe offers a star. Press it, and the animation joins your starred animations on the Animate strip of every video you make. Press it there, or press the search on the strip and choose Starred, and it lands on the item you have selected, whatever that item is, replacing what it holds and asking first if you have tuned that one. It is listed only on an item that can play it, so one with a morph shows on shapes. It keeps the item's whole animation: how it arrives, moves and leaves, its drawn path, its curves, its sprites, how it falls and swings, and its morph. A path stands where the new item stands, and a path or curve that ran the whole length of the old item runs the whole length of the new one, and a new item falls from where it stands. It leaves behind a speed ramp, what the item follows, what it hits, when each movement runs, and the item's own copies, bends and what it turns about, because those belong to one item. A starred animation also reaches a 3D model's Animate and an App, each taking the parts it can play.

Copy it to another item. Select an item, open More on it and choose Copy animation. Select another item, of any kind, and choose Paste animation from its More. It lands the way a starred animation does.

Animate a 3D object on a video

A 3D object takes the same Animate menu as every other item. Spin, Turn, Float, Sway, Breathe, Orbit, Squash, Swing, Tumble and Hop move the model itself, so its sides come round; every other movement, and one driven by Beat, moves its picture. Spin turns the model as a turntable does until you pick another Axis.

Play a rigged model's clips. Its clips are cards on the same strip: This model holds the file's own, and Clip library holds free clips, on a model whose skeleton can take them. Press a card and the clip joins the container on the right with Remove and Recipe, whose rows are Start, Speed, Weight, Fade in and Fade out. Press another card to switch that clip, or + layer and then a card to play a second beside it; two that overlap crossfade.

The model plays live while its 3D, Transform or Animate tab is open. Leaving those tabs records it, and the video plays that recording.

Speed ramp a clip

A speed ramp lets a single clip change speed as it plays — start at normal speed, ease into slow motion, then speed back up — instead of one constant speed for the whole clip. It's the tool for dramatic slow-mo reveals, snappy speed-ups, and freeze-frames.

Select the clip, open Transform in the bottom bar, and press Ramp beside the Speed slider to open the curve over the video. (The Speed slider itself sets one constant speed for the clip; it's disabled while a ramp is driving the clip.) It is the same curve canvas Automate uses, opening on its Speed view, read in multiples of normal speed: raise a point and the clip plays faster there, lower it and it plays slower. The Value view shows the same curve as which moment of the footage plays when: a shallow stretch plays that part slower, a steep stretch plays it faster, and a flat stretch freezes the frame. Ramps offers Montage, Hero, Bullet and Flash, ready-made as ordinary points you can keep editing. Add a point at the playhead, drag points to reshape the curve, and remove a point to simplify it.

MotherFluxer prepares a retimed copy of the clip in the background so it plays back smoothly at the new speeds. Pressing Play never waits for it: the clip plays, and until the copy is ready the slowed stretches step rather than glide, with a note on the picture saying smooth slow motion arrives once the clip is prepared. Re-open the panel anytime to reshape the curve, or remove the ramp to return the clip to its original speed.

Land on the beat. On the beat in the Ramps menu is always there; on a video whose sound has a steady beat it writes a ramp from the hardest beats under the clip (pressed with nothing to land on, it says why — no sound yet, still listening, no steady beat, or none under this clip): the clip runs fast between the hardest beats and all but stops on each, and it stays the same length. It is an ordinary curve afterwards, so shape it as you like.

Freeze a frame. In the Recipe, the Speed section's Freeze holds the frame at the playhead for a second, and the rest of the clip plays on after it, so no footage is lost and the clip runs that much longer. The clip's own sound rests through the freeze and picks up in step with the picture. Each freeze gets its own slider to set how long it holds, and the mark at its end takes it away.

Footage recorded fast keeps its frames when you slow it. Slow a clip shot at 60 frames a second — with the Speed slider or a ramp — and the editor plays the frames it actually recorded, so half speed is as smooth while you edit as it is in the export, with nothing made up in between. The first time you slow such a clip, MotherFluxer prepares a copy of it with every frame in the background; until that copy is ready the slowed part steps. Footage recorded faster than 60 frames a second plays at 60 in the editor, and the export always uses every frame your original holds.

Stabilize a clip

Stabilization smooths out camera shake, turning shaky handheld footage into steady, watchable video. Select the clip and open Transform in the bar along the bottom: Stabilize is a section of the settings row beside Speed and Reverse. Press it to open it, press its Off to turn it On, and set Smoothness beside it — greyed out while stabilizing is off.

Set how much smoothing you want with the Smoothness slider — more smoothing irons out bigger bumps, while less keeps more of the original camera movement — then Stabilize to apply it. MotherFluxer reads the clip's motion and then steadies the picture you are watching, so you see the result as you work rather than only after a render; pressing Play never waits for it. While the reading is still going the clip says so on the picture, and the steadied picture arrives when it finishes. Move the Smoothness slider again while it is on and the clip is re-stabilized at the new value, for a steadier or more natural result; press Stabilize again to switch it off and return to the original footage.