Animating an Effect

You may need to animate some effects to obtain the expected results. For example, you may want the radius of a Glow effect to slowly increase and decrease to make it pulsate throughout a scene, or you may want the transparency of a Transparency effect to increase from 0% to 100% to make a drawing vanish.

Almost all numerical parameters in an effect can be attached to a function. A function allows you to set a parameter to different values at different points in the scene by adding keyframes to it, and setting each keyframes to a specific value. Between keyframes, the value of the parameter will progress from the value of the previous keyframe to the value of the next keyframe. Drawing layers are animated by having their coordinates associated to functions. Likewise, effects can be animated by associating their parameters to functions.

Some effect parameters can be animated directly in the Timeline view, but not all. When you expand an effect's parameters in the Timeline view, some of its parameters may be hidden to avoid cluttering the Timeline view. You can animate those parameters from the Layer Properties view or the Layer Properties dialog, which display all of a layer's parameters.

NOTE To learn how to preview animated effects, refer to About Effects Preview.