Copying And Pasting Keyframes

Hello all. I am currently making an intro for someone on blender, and I’ve got to the point where I need to sync the text to the music. Ive got the syncing all set up and ready, and all I need to do now, is copy and paste the pumping animation for the text. Now, what should happen, is I should be able be to go into the dope sheet, right click on RotScale (which is what I used) and press ctr + c, and then, when I play my intro, press ctr + v to paste the key frames when I hear the beat that I want it to sync to. The problem I’m having is that when I paste my key frames, they are placed about 40-60 frames ahead of where I want them to be places. For example, I want to paste a key frame on frame 60, but when the timeline is on frame 60 and I press ctr + v, it pastes the keys frames on frame 82. This is really annoying, as I can’t sync my text. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks :slight_smile:

It’s your workflow that is flawed here. You really can’t be playing back an animation and expect to be able to paste frames exactly on the frame you want them. It just doesn’t work like that.

Playing an animation can really work a computer, blender is doing lots of stuff to make this happen. It’s calculating how the scene should look for a frame, (which is an intense amount of math) updating the displays you see, and generating sounds. It can be a lot of work for a computer to play an animation.

Then there is human error. Maybe you think you are pasting the frames on frame 60 when you hear the sound, but it might actually be frame 65 before the key is pressed to insert. Then it may take blender time to insert the keyframe. Then there is also the speed of your computer to consider. A low spec machine might be able to playback a text animation, but would struggle to do it and stuggle to paste the keys.

You’ll need to manually go into the dopesheet editor, set the frame you want to start pasting frames at, and paste the frames. Trust me on this, I’ve synced sound and animation before

By default, audio scrubbing the time line I think is disabled. Enable that, and you can drag to the frame you want and paste the keys with accuracy.

Hope this helps,
Randy

One workflow tip I use in other software is placing markers during playback. In Blender this is Key-M while hovering in timeline, dopesheet, or graph editor. Placing a marker is much less intensive than pasting a bunch of keys on the fly. Do your keying using those markers, your ears (as mentioned above), and the waveform display.

I’ve only done this in video editors with smooth playback. You may still get a lag in Blender if your system is struggling to playback. It’s not a precise to-the-frame method anyway. The markers are just an aid to speed up the manual keying work. They are a visual aid and also allows the use of the jump to markers feature. You’ll have to set shortcut keys for that in Blender (right click and set a shortcut on those items in the Marker menu).

Of course like most everything in Blender world, whether this advice helps or not depends on the job-at-hand. :wink:

-LP