Per-Slide Motion

Advanced. Most videos don’t need this: they’re animated by default, or take a built-in style, or a style or sequence saved in the editor, which gives the same control without writing it. Use motion when you want to write the animations yourself.

videoSettings.motion on Generate and Import gives slides their own motion. It’s a list with one entry per slide, in order. null leaves a slide to the style, or to the template’s motion, or as it is.

Example

A video in the Bold style, whose second slide has its own animations: the title types itself in, then the image fades in, then the button pulses until the slide ends. The slide arrives with a push upwards.

"videoSettings": {
    "motionStyle": "bold",
    "motion": [
        null,
        {
            "steps": [
                { "element": "title", "preset": "typewriter" },
                { "element": "image", "preset": "fade" },
                { "element": "cta", "preset": "pulse", "repeat": "until-end" }
            ],
            "transition": { "type": "push", "direction": "up" }
        }
    ]
}

On generate, the AI decides how many slides there are and what’s on them, so an entry for slide 3 may find no slide 3, or a slide without an image. Per-slide motion suits Import, where you write the slides.

Each entry

Each entry is an object with any of these fields:

An entry changes only what it gives. With a style, "transition": { "type": "none" } on its own keeps the style’s animations on that slide and only makes it cut in. A request with motion and no style isn’t given the default style: the slides it leaves out keep the template’s motion, or stay still.

Steps

Entrances play in order, each after the one before unless it has together. An emphasis plays once its own element has come in, and an exit ends with the slide; neither holds the entrances up.

Elements

Presets

fade, rise, slide (Slide in in the editor), zoom, pop, bounce, spring, blur, rotate, flash, split (Converge), glitch, shimmer, typewriter, wave, jump, wipe, sweep and count bring an element in or take it out. sweep draws a text’s highlighted words in, its coloured or boxed words, like a marker, one after another; on text with nothing highlighted it’s left out. count counts a text’s numbers up from zero, in the form the text writes them (“1,250” counts as “625”, then “1,250”), leaving years alone; on text with no numbers it’s left out. pulse, float and wiggle are emphases: they loop until their element leaves (its exit, or the end of the slide) unless repeat says how many times. kenburns slowly zooms in on a picture or the background and drifts it in its direction, once, over the rest of its slide; on a picture it moves the picture inside its frame. custom plays the step’s own keyframes instead of a preset’s, for any kind.

Keyframes

With "preset": "custom", a step plays keyframes of its own: 2 to 12 points along it, each saying where the element is then.

A property a keyframe leaves out is at rest: opacity 1, x and y 0, scale 1, rotate 0 and blur 0. An entrance is written as the element coming to rest, so its last keyframe sets nothing else, and an exit plays it backwards. An emphasis starts and ends at rest, so it can loop. direction doesn’t apply.

{
    "element": "title",
    "preset": "custom",
    "keyframes": [
        { "at": 0, "opacity": 0, "y": 60, "scale": 0.9 },
        { "at": 0.7, "y": -8, "easing": "back" },
        { "at": 1 }
    ]
}

Transitions

With a style, a sequence or a template

motion comes last: it changes slides over the template’s motion, the style and a saved sequence. An entry’s steps replace the slide’s animations, and a slide given its motion outright doesn’t take the sequence.

What’s checked

The motion is checked when you make the request, before anything is generated. An unknown element or preset, a step whose kind doesn’t suit its preset, keyframes that break the rules above, an unknown field or a value out of range returns a 422 that says where it is, such as videoSettings.motion[1].steps.0.element: ….

What depends on the slides can’t be checked until they exist. A step for an element a slide doesn’t show, such as an image on a slide without one, is left out, and so are entries past the last slide. The post still completes, and the COMPOSE_MOTION step in Check Post Status says what was left out.