Anyone creating molecular animations knows how challenging it can be to maintain a consistent camera view across frames. You might align the perfect visual at frame 10, only to find it slightly shifted by frame 30—just enough to lose coherence or distract your audience.
This is where the Hold camera animation effect in SAMSON can help. It’s a small but powerful tool that provides stability in your visual storytelling by locking the camera position between specific frames.
Why Consistent Camera Angles Matter
If you’re presenting a drug binding interaction, comparing mutant structures, or visualizing a reaction mechanism, maintaining a fixed view allows your audience to follow the changes that matter—without the distraction of dynamic panning or zooming. Even small shifts in perspective can undermine the clarity you’re aiming for.
The Problem: Unintended Camera Movements
When you’re working interactively with a SAMSON document, you probably move the view frequently. If you’re not explicitly animating the camera, these view changes can accidentally propagate into animations—making part of your sequence inconsistent or disorienting when played back or exported as a video.
The Solution: Hold Camera
The Hold camera animation locks the camera at a chosen orientation between two frames. It ensures your chosen view remains steady even if the document’s interactive view changes later.
How to Use It
Here’s how to stabilize your camera view in a SAMSON animation:
- First, pick the frame where you want the static camera to begin—say, frame 10. Go to the Animator’s Track view and make sure you are at the right spot on the timeline.
- Then, rotate and zoom to set the exact camera orientation you want for that frame.
- Open the Animation panel and double-click on the Hold camera effect.
- This will add a hold camera animation starting at your current frame. Drag its end to the desired final frame (e.g., frame 30).
If at any point you realize you’d like a different framing, you can move the start and end frames along the timeline, or adjust the camera and update the animation.
Good to Know
You might notice some older tutorials mention the ‘Animation menu’. As of now, camera-related effects like Hold camera are managed through the Animation panel in the Animator. You can find it via the menus or use the shortcut Ctrl + 7 (or Cmd + 7 on macOS).
This feature becomes especially handy when using multiple animations (movement, visibility changes, object transformations) and you want everything else to shift while the view stays still.
To learn more and see animated examples, visit the original documentation page: Hold camera animation in SAMSON.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.