Use the virtual camera in Animate

Animate CC now has a native camera tool to help you tell a more engaging story by adding zoom, rotate, and panning motion. This project is available for you to download and to follow along with.
Let's scrub back to the very beginning of our project. We can see that we have a number of different layers and folders here. In our tools panel you'll find the new camera tool.
You can see that we have a number of different Camera properties exposed. We have a Zoom, we have also have Rotation which lets us rotate the entire stage. Additionally, we have Tint and Color Effects. We're using an action script through document type for this project. Since that document type supports both Tint and color adjustments on the camera. Other document types have various support for these effects but they all support use of camera movement.
Note that down in our timeline we now have a special camera layer and we also have this UI overlay for the camera, we're able to select zoom or rotation and then perform zooms and rotations with this slider. Additionally, we can pan by simply clicking and dragging.
If we want we can toggle the camera on and off by using the camera button right here in the timeline and that resets everything to have no camera whatsoever. Let's turn that back on. You may also notice that content that extends past state on to the pace board is invisible. That's because of this little feature right here. I can clip the content outside the stage when this is enabled or disable it to see how the content lays across the pace board as well. Let's go ahead and undo these steps.
Now let's use camera tool to enhance our story with camera motion. The first thing I'll do is to select the camera tool once again and on frame one, notice that there's a key frame on my camera layer. From here I'm able to do is Zoom, so I can use this scrubber right here or I can type in the exact zoom amount that I want and it's pretty significant.
So I'm going to type it in here to 820 and then I'm going to use the pan feature and pan to where the prince is. To focus on his face just like that, with that done let's scrub over to frame 50 and we'll insert a new key frame. To do that we choose Insert, Timeline, Keyframe. On this keyframe we want to pull the camera back, so what we'll do is take it back to about 115 and just pan around until we have the full scene in view.
What this does is makes a nice quick cut from his face to the water scene. Let's continue on to frame 100. In here, I'm going to create another keyframe. So Insert, Timeline, Keyframe and with the camera tool selected, we can assume all the way in to about 600 percent. And then I'm going to pan down to his sword.
Going over to 125, let's insert an additional keyframe here. And from there I'm going to pan up the sword until we see the hilt. Next we'll pop over to frame 145 and just as before we will Insert a new Keyframe. Here we'll establish another wide shot. So zoom in to about 110and then once again pan until the entire shot is in frame. From here we want to zoom in on to castle, and we're going to do that at around frame 220.
So scrubbing ahead to the final frame we can go ahead and Insert a new Keyframe here. And then using the camera tool once again let's zoom in to about 190 percent and pan over to the castle. So right now we've got a bunch of quick jump cuts that happen across a animation.
What we're going to do is smooth out the action in a few places with tweening. The first part we want to tween starts on frame 100 so we'll move over there. And what we're going to do is tween from the tip of the sword to the hilt. So we've already got the keyframes in place. All I need to do is right-click on this tween span and choose to create a motion or a classic tween.
In this case, I'm going to be using Classic Tweens, since the keyframes are already in place. And there we are. The camera pans up the sword until it rests on his hilt. Next, we'll move over to about 145 here. We want to create a motion tween across this keyframe and the next when we zoom in to the castle. So once again we'll right click on that frame span and choose to create a Classic Tween. There we go.
So the last thing we want to do is actually go ahead and add some of those camera effects. So let's go all the way down here and what we'll do is set a new keyframe around frame 200...And then at frame 220 we'll go ahead and choose the camera once again and do some color adjustments. What we'll adjust is the Brightness and Saturation. We want to pull these both down to negative 100. So it creates a sort of faded out desaturated effect. Because I've placed this Keyframe at frame 200, you can see that, that already retains the Brightness and Saturation levels that we had previously.
The final touch is going to be to add some Ease into our camera movements. So let's go back to our first tween and you can select anywhere within this Classic Tween. It doesn't really matter. And you'll notice in the properties panel here we have Ease in and we could apply some simple Ease in here but I'm actually going to go ahead and do some Edit Ease in. Because I want this to sort of come in slowly and go out slowly in terms of the Ease motion. So it's nice gradual climb here, let's hit OK.
And if you want to test it out we can always enter and see how that looks. Moving over to our next tween, we'll do the same thing. We'll take that down so it eases in nicely. Well, we wanted to sort of level off here and the reason that we wanted to level off is because we have this additional Keyframe here and an additional tween. If we edit this tween and only Ease out from the end...Then it's going to form a nice continual S-curve across both of those Classic Tweens.
Let's check it out. Perfect. What we'll do now is actually export this as HD video. So to do that, we can go File, Export and Export Video. Here we can choose exactly where we want to export the video. I'll just name it as Camera Completed. And hit Export.
The new camera tool in Adobe Animate CC opens up a wide range of storytelling possibilities for creative animators.