Joe's Filters: Joe's Time Bender

The Joe's Time Bender plugin is a part of Joe's Filters, shareware utility and image processing effects for Final Cut Pro.

What it does

Joe's Time Bender re-maps time in a clip, creating gradual speed changes and variable rate playback effects.

This filter requires keyframes, without keyframes it will produce a still image.

The interface is similar to After Effects time-remapping functions, the vertical keyframe axis represents the frame to display while the horizontal axis is the current moment in time. Normal speed playback is a straight diagonal line from 0 at the in point to 100 at the out point.

Keyframing

To make keyframing easier, I recommend expanding the Viewer keyframe area. Dragging the bottom line of the Frame slider's keyframe space towards the bottom of the window will stretch it vertically.

To set up the filter for re-mapping time, do the following:

1. Press Shift-I to go to the In Point
2. Click the Keyframe button to add a keyframe here with a value of 0
3. Press Shift-O to go to the Out Point.
4. Drag the Frame slider to 100.

Now the effect is set up for normal speed playback. This line is important because whatever pitch (steepness) it is will be 100% playback speed. Making the line flatter (less steep) will slow playback, increasing it's pitch (steeper) will cause the clip to playback faster.

Control clicking on the keyframe points allows them to be changed to Smooth points, which adds control handles for bending the curve between points. Below are some examples of what is possible with a few simple curves.

Example Images

Start fast and slow down at the end

Start Slow and speed up towards the end

Start fast and end fast, slowing down in the middle

Start normal, slow in middle, reverse fast back to start

Start fast, slow and revese in middle, finish fast

Help out

If you have other examples or success stories, please let me know!

The Controls

• Frame (1 - 100)

  Sets the position of the current frame as a percentage of the complete clip. Zero is the first frame and 100 is the last frame. Keyframing this value results in the specified frame showing at position of the keyframe.

• Frame Blending

  Blends frames for smoother output motion. Frame Blending is weighted so inbetween frames will lean towards or away from whichever frame it's closer to. When fast motion is slowed down, frame blending may appear as strobing between frames. Rendering is substantially faster with Frame Blending off.

Known Issues

Currently there is no way to specify a numeric rate for playback between keyframes. Because FXScript doesn't seem to be able to access past or future keyframe data, there might not be a way to do this, but I'm looking into it.

There is an occasional bug which seems to exist only in FCP 3 on OS X. Occasionally, if a filter is applied before Joe's Time Bender, FCP will occasionally report an "Unknown FXScript Error". The workaround is to apply Time Bender first in the filter stack. I couldn't get this to happen in FCP 2