Speed ramps & slow motion
Park the playhead where the change should start and press Ramp to 25%. The clip eases into quarter speed over half a second and stays there. Ramp back to 100% eases out again. There is also 50%, 200%, and a ramp to a freeze frame. All of them are in the command palette, so you can just type “ramp”.
Slowing down automatically turns on Pixel Motion frame blending — 25% without it is the same frames held four times each, which reads as broken rather than as slow motion. (If you had deliberately set frame blending to Off, the command respects that and leaves it alone.)
What it works on
Anything with a source to retime: video, audio and pre-comps. Ramping a pre-comp retimes everything inside it.
Shapes and solids are excluded on purpose: a ramp retimes the footage, not the animation you put on top of it — the same separation After Effects makes. Your keyframes on the layer keep their own timing.
Why this beats keyframing “speed”
Speed is a rate; what the renderer needs is which source frame to show when, which is the mathematical integral of speed. This is why After Effects makes you shape a Time Remap graph by hand, and why that graph is famously awkward.
Premation lets you say it in the units you think in — “100% here, 25% there” — and computes the exact curve for you. The result is two keyframes with one derived Bézier, not ninety baked ones, and it is mathematically exact, not approximated. Open the graph editor and it is a curve you can still grab and reshape like any other.
Animation → Time
The time commands live in one menu, Animation ▸ Time, and act on the selected layers:
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| Enable Time Remapping | Adds a keyframeable time-remap property, the general tool the ramps below are built from |
| Time-Reverse Layer | Plays the layer backwards; the in and out points stay where they are |
| Time Stretch… | Stretches or compresses the layer’s duration by a factor or to a target length. Since 0.8.3 it works on any layer, not just footage |
| Freeze Frame · Freeze On Last Frame | Holds the frame under the playhead, or the layer’s last frame |
| Retime: Speed % · Retime: Frame Number | Retime the layer by a keyframeable speed, or by naming the source frame |
| Speed Ramp to 25% | The ramp described above. The other ramps — 50%, 200%, back to 100%, to a freeze — are in the command palette |
| Frame Blend: Off / Frame Mix / Pixel Motion | How in-between frames are made when footage is slowed |
Behaviour worth knowing
- Ramps chain. Ramping to 25% and later back to 100% starts the second ramp from quarter speed — it never snaps to full speed first.
- No jump cuts. Inserting a ramp mid-clip continues from the frame on screen; the footage never leaps back to the head of the clip.
- Earlier ramps survive later ones. Keyframes before the playhead are left alone.
Freeze frames are the same mechanism ramped to 0%. Ramp to a freeze, hold as long as you like, then ramp back out — the classic promo move is three presses.