Quick Tip: Time Remapping in After Effects

Learn the importance of time remapping with this After Effects video tutorial.

Did you know that you can remap how your compositions play out over time  inside After Effects? Time Remapping is one of the most exciting features in After Effects, and the creative possibilities of this feature are endless.

So in this tutorial we're going to take a look at time remapping and how it can radically change the way you work in After Effects. So keep reading as we take a journey through time!

Time Remapping in After Effects Tutorial

Let's take a look at this incredible feature with this tutorial from Jacob Richardson.

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Time Remapping is Awesome

Time remapping is an extremely useful feature but it isn't going to find it's way into every project you create. However, when you call upon its name, it will feel like you're winning a workflow award.

There are a lot of ways that you can use the time remapping tool. One of the most obvious ways is simply the ability to make your composition play out faster or slower.

What's really neat is that anything that is native to After Effects is frame rate independent. Unlike footage, the layers and effects built inside of After Effects don't have a set frame rate.

This means that animations that use native shape layers can be slowed down and sped up without looking choppy. If you were to stretch video footage, you would only be able to go so far before the footage looked choppy.

How to Access Time Remapping in After Effects

Here are the steps you'll need to take to enable time remapping in After Effects:

• Right-click your pre-comp
• Near the top of the menu, hover over "time"
• Click "Enable Time Remapping"
• The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Alt+T

If done successfully, you will see keyframes placed at the beginning and end of your layer. You can now start to move around each of the keyframes and even add additional keyframes.

Cool Things to Try with Time Remapping

Here's a fun experiment with Time Remapping, you can start with a linear move and then turn it into a pre-composition

Once it's inside a pre-composition you can now enable time remapping and we can start to play with the speed graph. Let's give this animation some life and make it more interesting.

Each one of the keyframes were set to easy-ease, and then the bezier handles were moved to where the animation could dynamically flow. Below is the end result, after a little bit of compositing.

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With just a little bit of time remapping, you can bring animations to life! This would have been fairly difficult to do with just animating the offset values of the stroke.

SOME GOOD THINGS TO KNOW

By default there are two keyframes set, but you're allowed to place more than that. If you're going to place more keyframes then we would suggest that you place them before moving around the default keyframes.

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