Animation problems

Animation has more prerequisites than any other part of the program: a tab that has to be active, a track that has to exist, and a handful of settings that quietly override a keyed value. Almost every report about “animation does not work” is one of those. This page names them.

Applies to BASIC, STUDIO, CINEMA · Needs the Animation Tool add-on (included in the CINEMA trial) · You need: a shot open on the ANIMATION tab.

The ANIMATION tab is not there

Cause. The tab appears only when the licence carries the Animation Tool add-on. Without it there is no tab, not a disabled one.

What to do. Check your add-ons in Help → License Management; the CINEMA trial includes the add-on. See License and activation problems.

The key shortcut does nothing

Cause. Two conditions have to hold: something must be selected, and the ANIMATION tab must be the active one. On another tab the key is not dispatched to the animation editor at all.

What to do. Open the ANIMATION tab, select the object, then insert the key. Insert Keyframe in the editor’s button row does the same thing and shows you what it will key.

Recording is on but nothing is stored

Cause. Automatic Keyframe Recording only writes keys for properties that are already animated. It does not create the first track for you.

What to do. Insert the first keyframe of every property by hand, then switch recording on for the rest of the work. Note also that loading a shot switches recording off on purpose, so that a change you make right after loading does not silently become animation.

Playback stutters while the finished video is smooth

Cause. Playback in the editor runs in real time and skips frames on a heavy set. The video is rendered frame by frame and does not skip anything.

What to do. Use playback to check timing, not smoothness. If you need a smoother preview, hide what you are not looking at or lower the studio-view quality — see Make it faster.

Previous Keyframe or Next Keyframe does nothing

Cause. There is no keyframe left in that direction. The two buttons jump to the nearest key and then stop at the outermost one — they never walk past the last key, and they never step a single frame.

What to do. Nothing is wrong. To move by one frame, drag the playhead in the frame ruler; to reach a particular key, double-click its diamond. If the button does nothing at all, the shot has no keyframes yet, or the only ones are behind you.

The movement changed after Convert to Path

Cause. Not the keyframes — they are all there, at the same frames and the same positions. A path is travelled along one Distance channel, while three curves are interpolated per axis, so the speed and the easing between your keys are re-shaped by the conversion.

What to do. Check the stretches between the keys and re-shape them in the Curve Editor, or undo with Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on macOS) to go back to the curves. See Shape the motion (curves and easing).

My still render shows a different frame

Cause. A still of an animated shot is rendered at the shot’s stored preview frame, not at the position the playhead happens to be in.

What to do. Move the preview frame of the shot to the frame you want as its still. See Render a video for the difference between a still and a video.

Render Video is greyed out or missing

Cause. Either no animated shot is selected, or the licence has no Animation Tool.

What to do. Select a shot that contains animation. The button lives in the RENDER tab’s inspector.

The camera ignores its Position keys

Cause. The camera is attached to a rail. Its place along the track is a different property from its position in the room, and only that one has any effect while it is attached.

What to do. Animate Rail Position instead. See Animate the camera.

A keyed head rotation is ignored

Cause. The rig has Target Locked, and the target lock decides where the head points.

What to do. Switch the target lock off before you key head angles, or animate the target point instead.

Focus keys do nothing

Cause. Manual Focus is off, so the camera is measuring its focus itself and your keys have nothing to drive.

What to do. Switch Manual Focus on, then key the focus distance.

My exposure ramp jumps instead of gliding

Cause. Aperture, shutter, ISO and the ND filter are lists of fixed values, not continuous numbers, so their keys hold a value and then switch at the next key. That is deliberate: such a key is always Constant, and choosing another interpolation for it does nothing.

What to do. Key every stop you want to pass through — that is what makes a ramp out of a ladder. If a single frame shows a stop you never set, check whether a key was dragged up or down out of the list’s range in the Curve Editor: the value then falls back to the first entry of that list, ISO 3 on the ISO row, and Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z) undoes it.

A copy of an animated object runs beside the original, not on its path

Cause. A copy takes the animation with it — Duplicate, Ctrl+V and Alt-drag all do — and its Position keys are shifted by the offset the copy gets: the sideways step to the next free spot, or the distance you dragged. Two objects are never put inside each other, so the keys follow the copy.

What to do. Nothing, if you wanted a second object moving alongside the first. For the identical path, paste the copy into another shot or another project: there it lands at the stored position with its keys unchanged, as long as that position is free. Inside one set, drag the copy’s path keys where you want them.

Every other track — power, colour, pose, clip lane, the openings of a prop — is copied unchanged.

Undo after two pastes only removes the last copy

Cause. Every paste closes its own undo step, so two Ctrl+V from the same clipboard are two steps, not one.

What to do. Press Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z) once per paste. Each step takes the copy and its tracks together, and the timeline goes back to the length it had.

A row reports the object as missing

Cause. The object that the track belonged to was deleted. The track and its keyframes stay behind with nothing to drive.

What to do. Delete the track, or undo the deletion of the object if you still need the animation.

The model twitches every few seconds

Cause. A motion clip that is not marked as looping has been stretched beyond its own length. The jump you see is the clip starting again.

What to do. Use a looping clip for a long shot, or shorten the clip to its own length. See Animate models.

My animated sunlight does nothing

Cause. The camera is inside a closed room. Sun and sky are suppressed there, whether they are animated or not.

What to do. Cut a window or a door portal, or move the camera out of the room. See Light a room through a window.

Playback restarts at frame 0

Cause. The two playback markers sit on the same frame, so there is no range to play.

What to do. Move them apart in the frame ruler. See Work in the Timeline Editor.

Not a bug

Many labels of the animation editor are English in every interface language — the interpolation and easing names, the tangent modes and the right-click commands among them.
On a Position track the Curve Editor labels its three channels X, Z, Y, in storage order. That is not a mix-up: the labels follow the studio’s own axis names, so Z is the height and Y the depth, and the right-click menu’s Insert Keyframe Y and Insert Keyframe Z land on the curve that carries the same letter.
Previous Keyframe and Next Keyframe count the keys of every track in the animation, not only the selected row, so on a shot with several animated objects they land on frames that carry no key for the object you are working on.
A project saved by an older version can carry a framerate outside the range the field accepts. The value is kept; the field only refuses new ones outside 2–120.
Rendering a video is one still render per frame, so its cost is the cost of one image multiplied by the number of frames.

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