What is a Keyframe and what does it do?
As the movie starts, the screen is black and all is quiet. Then, slowly, both the picture and background music begin to fade in. A television news broadcast tells a story and at a certain point a small picture depicting elements of the news story appears on screen in a small window, then disappears. In a crazy dream sequence images dance their way across the screen, spinning and changing size and position as they go. At the end of the movie the credits scroll up the screen. All of these effects are created using Keyframes. Keyframing gives us the ability to change the appearance of our video over time and to make things move. In Final Cut Express we have the ability to change elements of our video as it plays on the screen. We can fade a clip in and out, fade the audio up or down as well as lower or raise the volume of the clip in different places. We can change the size of our clips, move them around the screen as in ‘Picture in Picture’, rotate, crop or distort them. We can animate o
