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I'm having a surprising amount of difficulty finding an answer to a rather simple question...

I've worked out how to animate things in Blender. But I'm having trouble putting cuts into the animation.

Initially I had the camera just fly from place to place, but the repeated fairly fast camera movements come across as rather disorienting and confusing. Then I had the idea that maybe cutting from shot to shot might work better. But how do I do that, exactly?

My first though was that this would be trivial: If you put two keyframes on consecutive frames, the camera position will just instantly snap to the next keyframe. Well, it does, but it also screws up all the interpolation. (Presumably Blender is still trying to make the control spline smooth, so it's changing the animation I've already set up.) It's also really fiddly to set up this way.

I'm really struggling to find the right search terms to answer this simple question. Google returns lots of hits for how to existing cut video files (not what I'm asking), or how to animate a character jumping (nope), or how to animate cutting an object in half (still no).

I did find a few glimmers of relevant stuff, but I don't really understand it. One page off-handedly mentioned multiple cameras. (Wouldn't that be an error? How would that even work?) Another hinted at having multiple "scenes". (What's that?) But I couldn't find any in-depth explanations.

Basically, what is the "correct" way to cut between shots? Surely everybody does this constantly, all the time, so I'm confused as to why I can't find any information about it...

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    $\begingroup$ You can set markers in the animation time-line to set which camera is active at a given frame : blender.stackexchange.com/a/3503/86891 $\endgroup$
    – Gorgious
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 9:49
  • $\begingroup$ Here's the video. Hope this helps. youtube.com/watch?v=i1idLrDgbE4 $\endgroup$
    – RenegadeCash436
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 10:18
  • $\begingroup$ @Gorgious Is multiple cameras the best way to do this then? $\endgroup$
    – MathematicalOrchid
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 12:18
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, else as you experienced, you risk having some motion blur or other artifacts between frames $\endgroup$
    – Gorgious
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 15:09

2 Answers 2

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As per the comments, I eventually went with the approach of using multiple cameras.

Basically this consists of:

  • Have more than one camera object in the file.
  • Add "markers" to the dope sheet on a specific frame number.
  • Select the marker you want, select the camera you want, and find the hidden menu item to "bind" one to the other.

Now the render output does a hard-cut from one camera to the other when that specific frame is reached.

Unfortunately, binding a camera to a marker deletes the label on the marker, so it's now useless for... you know... marking anything. But hey, it generates the right output frames...

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Just put camera keyframes as close to each other as possible. Now camera has no time to slide and it will teleport instantly.

Hope it helps,

Kirillenter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ As I explained, I already did that, and while the camera does teleport instantly, it also messes up the smoothing of the rest of the animation. $\endgroup$
    – MathematicalOrchid
    Commented May 11, 2020 at 10:07
  • $\begingroup$ It does not mess up the rest of the animation. It is working as intended as the animation tries to interpolate all the way through your frames you have keyed. Select the Camera in question. Open a Graph Editor Window. (Bonus points for doing in the in Animation Layout!) $\endgroup$
    – Map Monkey
    Commented May 18, 2021 at 0:50
  • $\begingroup$ Open Properties with N key. Select key for last frame of Shot A. In Active Keyframe, change the Interpolation from Bezier to Constant. This says, "do what the previous curve says until here; then change instantly to the next curve." Repeat for any other keys set on the Camera. $\endgroup$
    – Map Monkey
    Commented May 18, 2021 at 1:05

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