Speed ramp and slow motion video
Ease into slow motion with two keyframes
A speed ramp slows footage into a moment and speeds it back out, instead of cutting to slow motion. In most tools that means shaping a time-remap graph by hand. Premation takes the speeds you name and writes the exact curve as two keyframes you can still edit.
Free · AGPL-3.0-only · macOS & Windows
The panel that does it
The editor’s own panel, rebuilt on its chrome. It works: drag, toggle, queue.
How to do it
- 01
Park the playhead where the change starts
Select the video layer and move to the frame where the slow-down should begin. Ramps work on video, audio and pre-comps.
- 02
Layer ▸ Time ▸ Speed Ramp to 25%
Or type ramp in the command palette. The clip eases into quarter speed over half a second and stays there. 50%, 200% and a freeze frame are in the same menu.
- 03
Ramp back to 100%
Move to where normal speed should return and ramp back. Ramps chain: the second starts from quarter speed and never snaps to full speed first.
- 04
Reshape it in the graph editor
The ramp is two keyframes on a time-remap curve with one derived Bézier, not ninety baked keys. Open the graph editor and drag the handles like any other curve.
Questions
- Does the audio change speed too?
- Yes. When a clip's picture is retimed, its audio follows the retimed picture rather than staying at the original speed.
- Will slow motion look smooth on 30 fps footage?
- Pixel Motion estimates the in-between frames with optical flow, which is far better than holding each frame four times. It is still an estimate: fast or crossing motion can smear, and footage shot at a high frame rate will always look better.
- Do my keyframes on the layer get retimed?
- No. A ramp retimes the footage, not the animation on top of it. Position, scale and effect keyframes keep their own timing.