Three things keep newer editors up at night: death, taxes, and keyframe interpolation. Those little diamond shapes in the interface are intimidating enough, but, wait! Why does my keyframe suddenly look like an hourglass? Why are my motion paths curving when I want a straight line? What’s going on!?

Changing keyframe interpolation is all about changing how a clip gets from value A to value B - that is, how fast and what path it takes to get there. You most often will encounter temporal interpolation on most keyframeable parameters, which affects how fast a clip moves, but with the Position parameter, you will also see spatial interpolation.

Temporal Interpolation

Let’s start simple. Premiere defaults to creating linear keyframes for the speed a clip changes parameter values. You can more or less replace the word “linear” with “constant.” If you have a clip move from position A to position B, it will take off at and maintain the same speed from the first frame of the animation to the last.

You can see this by clicking on the often overlooked disclosure triangle next to any keyframes parameter. This brings up the speed graph in Premiere. It’s a little primitive compared to After Effects’ graph, but it’s better than nothing at all. Let’s say we have a simple keyframe scenario where we have a clip move from the left to the right side of the screen (click here for a sample file). If we hover the mouse anywhere over the flat line between two position key frames, it gives us the rate/speed at which our clip is moving.