Holds

Holds

At this point you may have a fairly realistic looking bouncing
ball; maybe you added a little Rotation animation so
the ball spins forward as it bounces, or maybe you handadjusted
the timing or position keys to give them that extra
little organic unevenness.
Hold keyframes won’t help improve this animation, but
you could make the ball disappear each time it hits the
ground, and reappear at the top of the arc, with no eases.
A Hold keyframe (Ctrl+Alt+H/Cmd+Shift+H) prevents
any change to a value until the next keyframe.
Add keyframes alternating between 100% and 0% Opacity
at the same time as the existing Y Position keyframes. If you
leave them as linear keyframes, the ball oscillates between
opaque and transparent, but if you toggle them to Hold
keyframes, it snaps on and off .

Beyond Bouncing Balls

In the (possibly likely) case that the need for a bouncing
ball animation never comes up, what does this example
show you? Let’s recap:
. You can control a motion path in the Composition
viewer using Bézier tools and the Pen tool (usage
detailed in the next chapter).
. Realistic motion often requires that you shape the
motion path Béziers and add temporal eases; the two
actions are performed independently on any given
keyframe, and in two different places (in the viewer
and Timeline).