Preferences

You'll eventually want to customize your workspace to suit your own tastes, but for now, let's set ours up the same way. On the first tab of the preferences, General, set your default interpolation to Decelerate. This means that any new parameter you animate in Graffiti will automatically decelerate as it moves from one keyframe to the next.

You'll definitely see the advantages of automatic keyframing as we go. I draw your attention to it here both because it so dramatically speeds up your work, but also because this is the exact opposite of most applications with keyframes: they assume NOTHING is animated until you make it animate. Boris assumes that EVERYTHING is animated until you tell it otherwise.

There's no technical reason for selecting the default of Decelerate, by the way. I just like how it looks when titles come in for a smooth landing.

(Note for Media 100 users: the default for you will normally be Constant, which allows your static titles to play in real time. That's exactly what you want for static titles, but we're animating here.)

On the Preview tab, set the Composite Background Style to Color, rather than the default Checkerboard. Again, there's no technical reason for this, but it will help you to follow along if your set-up resembles what you see here. Close the Preferences Window, go to the Graffiti timeline and delete both of the tracks that are there by default.

I'm going to mention one other preference, on the last tab, called Render Fields as Frames. It won't have any effect here in the Keyframer, where we're not going to do any rendering, but you'll definitely want this on before you render titles in your NLE.

Now let's get started.

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