Scene cut continuity

[Greenlaw]

Man, I always forget that exists. (Thanks Wes!)

Yes, that's the easiest way to copy a frame because it doesn't require freezing and copying existing keyframes--it will create the keys for you wherever you tell it to (in your case, frame 1.)

If the two scenes are going to be edited continuously, here's yet another option: just make a copy of your scene, delete anything you don't want in the new scene, and import the new stuff (new set, props, etc.) Now just set your render range to start with the frame after where you left off in the original.

You can render the frames as a new sequence to its own directory or render it to the same output directory for the original scene and make it all one sequence, your choice.

[Jkoseattle]

Yeah I thought of that, but since this video will be several minutes long, most of which a single shot, I would eventually be starting a scene at frame 2897, at that just seemed wrong. Much better for me to just ask someone rather than try to guess at the best method with my still microscopically small knowledge of the application.

[Greenlaw]

Wow, that's sounds crazy.

If I were planning that, I would try to build in logical 'cut' points where you can try to hide the edits. Kinda like the Hitchcock movie Rope--back then, the film canisters only held 10 or so minutes of film so he planned the 'cuts' to be hidden when focused on somebody's back and other 'obstructions'.

There's a Russian feature film that's much more recent called Russian Arc, and it actually was shot continuously. The film moves through many locations with some tricky camera moves. Now that's nuts!

[Jkoseattle]

I remember that about Rope, and have always been a fan of the long continuous shot. I'll try to remember Russian Arc, I'd like to see that. The opening of The Player has a good one. My favorite is the year-passing montage from Notting Hill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce_BXD_ONQ8, where we see a whole year pass as Hugh Grant walks through the town through all four seasons, and a we see pregnant woman at the top of the shot then she's pushing a stroller at the end, and a couple in love that later breaks up. Goose bumps. I like to imagine the behind-the-scenes logistical organization that was required to pull off a shot like that. Birdman used a lot of those to terrific effect, but of course with CGI it's not quite the same cuz you can cheat. Opens up great possibilities for storytelling though. But I digress...

My video is much, much humbler. It's a single shot of a character delivering a speech to a large crowd. Cutaways to crowd reactions and a big section in the middle with abstract line drawings.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, I just saw Spectre the other day...that has a long continuous shot that runs for several minutes, through a carnival, into a hotel, and onto the rooftops of a couple of buildings. I think the camera even goes overhead once.

[Jkoseattle]

Come to think of it, both of my in-parallel debut animated videos will be single-shot affairs, though one is whiteboard animation and the other is this speech. On reflection, I think keeping lines of sight and perspectives straight and getting the shot editing right is more than a little intimidating....

[Jkoseattle]

New problem with this scene continuity thing:

I have done Animation / Copy Current Frame... and pasted it to frame 1, removing all animation after that. It worked like a charm. However, the process created a keyframe for every last thing it could create a keyframe for. This creates a lot of clutter in my timeline, as now I have a long string of pearls down the frame 1 column, and way too many keyframe rows to navigate. Copying to frame 0 instead of frame 1 doesn't fix it, either. Ideas?

[synthsin75]

Animation>Copy Current Frame allows you to select which channels are copied.

[Greenlaw]

Or you can just ignore them.

Most of the time, I only pay attention to the global channels and the red 'selected' channels just underneath. In fact, it's pretty rare when I need to access any of the lower channels. If I need it to be even simpler, like when re-timing the scene, I'll temporarily consolidate the timeline.

But it's good practice to delete the unwanted keys immediately when you accidentally create them, and just avoid creating keys in those channels in the first place. You can filter which channels you want at frame 1 by checking the channels in the panel. (Usually, this would be the first three transforms in the third column, and maybe the Switch channels unless these are driven by SBD. It depends on your particular setup of course.)

[Jkoseattle]

Yeah, what's not made clear from that if you say you want the whole document then it's going to create a key frame for everything regardless of whether you've touched that channel before.

[Greenlaw]

Yes, that option assumes you want the state of every thing at that frame. What you probably want to do is select the layers you want to copy from first, and then select the channels you want--and don't enable Copy Entire Document.

It's pretty straightforward after you've used it a couple of times. (I just keep forgetting it's even there to use.)