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Freevisuals
Nothing signals an unpolished animation faster than motion that starts and stops abruptly, snapping instantly into full speed and stopping just as suddenly. Real world motion almost never behaves this way, objects accelerate gradually and decelerate before coming to rest, and After Effects gives editors a genuinely simple tool for recreating this natural feeling motion called Easy Ease. This guide covers exactly what Easy Ease does, how to apply it, and how to fine tune it once the basic default no longer feels quite right for a specific animation.
Easy Ease is a keyframe interpolation setting in After Effects that smooths the acceleration and deceleration of an animated property, replacing abrupt, mechanical looking motion with something that reads as considerably more natural and polished. This post covers the default linear keyframe behavior Easy Ease is designed to fix, how to apply it with a single keyboard shortcut, how to fine tune the specific curve using the Graph Editor, and common situations where Easy Ease genuinely improves an animation versus where a different interpolation approach might serve better. It also includes a genuine video walkthrough, answers to frequent related questions, and practical tips for building animations that feel considered rather than mechanical.
By Jack Wright, Founder, Freevisuals. Updated 2026.
When you set two keyframes in After Effects without adjusting anything further, the default interpolation between them is linear, meaning the animated property changes at a perfectly constant rate from the first keyframe straight through to the second. A layer moving from one position to another under linear interpolation travels at exactly the same speed throughout the entire move, instantly reaching full speed the moment the first keyframe passes and stopping just as instantly the moment it reaches the second.
This kind of motion rarely resembles how anything actually moves in the physical world. A car pulling away from a stop accelerates gradually rather than instantly reaching cruising speed, and a ball tossed into the air decelerates as it rises before reversing direction. Linear keyframes ignore this entirely, producing motion that reads as visibly artificial and mechanical even when the underlying animation concept itself is sound. Easy Ease exists specifically to address this gap, softening the sudden start and stop that linear interpolation otherwise creates.
The fastest way to apply Easy Ease is through a dedicated keyboard shortcut, the F9 key, applied after selecting one or more keyframes directly in your Timeline panel. This instantly converts the selected keyframes from their default linear behavior into an eased curve, visually indicated by the keyframe icon itself changing shape from a simple diamond to a rounded hourglass style icon, making it easy to identify at a glance which keyframes in a composition have already had easing applied and which remain in their default linear state.
Applying Easy Ease to both the starting and ending keyframe of a movement produces a smooth acceleration into the motion and a smooth deceleration out of it, the combination most commonly associated with natural, polished motion. Applying it to only one of the two keyframes produces an asymmetric result, easing gently into motion but stopping abruptly, or starting abruptly but easing gently to a stop, each of which can be a genuinely useful creative choice depending on the specific effect you are trying to achieve for a particular animation.
For a demonstration of how eased keyframes actually look once applied to real animated properties, watch Learn After Effects Expressions For Beginners, which touches on animation fundamentals including keyframe based motion that pairs naturally with the easing concepts covered in this guide. Seeing the visual difference between linear and eased motion play out directly inside a real composition tends to make the underlying concept click considerably faster than a written description alone can achieve.
While the default F9 Easy Ease shortcut produces a genuinely solid, usable result for most everyday animation work, After Effects also provides a dedicated Graph Editor for editors who want more precise control over exactly how an eased motion accelerates and decelerates. Switching your Timeline panel into Graph Editor view reveals a visual curve representing your animated property's speed over time, and this curve can be manipulated directly, dragging its control handles to make an ease more gradual, more abrupt, or asymmetric in ways the default F9 shortcut alone does not offer.
This becomes particularly valuable for animation work where a specific, deliberate feel matters beyond simple natural smoothness, a bouncy, energetic ease for playful content, or a slow, weighted ease for something meant to feel heavier and more deliberate. Learning to read and manipulate this speed graph directly represents a genuine step up in animation control beyond what the single keystroke default provides, and it is worth the additional learning investment for anyone doing motion graphics work regularly rather than only occasionally.
Despite how broadly useful Easy Ease is, it is not automatically the correct choice for every single animated movement. Certain effects specifically benefit from the mechanical, constant speed quality that linear interpolation provides, a scrolling ticker of text, a continuously rotating loading indicator, or any animation meant to feel deliberately uniform and unchanging rather than naturally organic. Applying Easy Ease indiscriminately to every single keyframe in a project, regardless of what that specific motion is actually meant to convey, can occasionally soften an animation into feeling vague or indecisive when a crisper, more mechanical motion would have actually served the content better.
Developing the judgment to recognize which specific animations benefit from easing and which genuinely call for linear or hold based interpolation instead comes largely through experience and deliberate attention to how different projects actually call for different qualities of motion, rather than defaulting to the same easing treatment across every single keyframe without further consideration.
Beyond linear and eased interpolation, After Effects also supports hold keyframes, which maintain a completely static value until the very instant the next keyframe is reached, at which point the value jumps instantly rather than transitioning gradually at all. This produces a distinctly different feel from either linear or eased motion, useful for stop motion style animation, deliberately choppy or glitch inspired effects, or situations where an instant, unblended change between two states is genuinely the desired outcome rather than any kind of smooth transition.
Understanding all three interpolation types together, linear, eased, and hold, gives you a genuinely complete toolkit for matching your animation's specific motion quality to whatever a particular project actually calls for, rather than defaulting to whichever interpolation style happens to be most familiar regardless of whether it genuinely suits the content.
A frequent mistake among newer After Effects users involves applying Easy Ease to every keyframe in a composition indiscriminately, including ones where a different interpolation style would genuinely serve the content better. Another common issue involves applying easing without ever checking the result in the Graph Editor, missing an opportunity to fine tune a default ease that may feel slightly too abrupt or too gradual for the specific motion being created. Since the default F9 easing curve is a reasonable starting point rather than a perfectly calibrated result for every possible situation, taking the extra moment to review and adjust it within the Graph Editor when a specific animation feels slightly off tends to produce noticeably more polished, considered results than accepting the default without question every single time.
A related mistake involves applying easing only to some of the keyframes within a longer, multi step animation sequence, creating an inconsistent motion quality where some segments feel natural while others retain the original abrupt linear character. Reviewing an entire animated sequence as a whole, rather than adjusting keyframes individually without considering how they read together, helps catch this kind of inconsistency before it becomes a visible, distracting flaw in an otherwise polished piece of motion work.
While position is the most commonly discussed example when explaining Easy Ease, the same principle applies to virtually any animatable property in After Effects, scale, rotation, opacity, and effect parameters all benefit from eased interpolation in broadly similar ways. A layer scaling up from nothing to full size looks noticeably more polished when that growth eases in and out rather than snapping through a constant, linear rate of change. Rotation animations benefit similarly, particularly for anything meant to feel weighted or physical rather than purely mechanical, since real world rotating objects rarely spin up or slow down at a perfectly constant rate.
Opacity fades represent a slightly different case worth understanding specifically, since a linear opacity fade often already reads as reasonably natural to the eye, given how gradually and evenly a fade in or fade out typically needs to occur. That said, easing an opacity fade can still add a subtle additional layer of polish, particularly for a fade paired with simultaneous movement or scale changes, where keeping all animated properties consistently eased together tends to produce a more cohesive overall motion than mixing eased and non eased properties within the same combined movement.
Beyond the mechanical process of applying and adjusting Easy Ease, developing a genuine eye for what natural motion actually looks like is a skill worth deliberately cultivating over time. Observing real world motion specifically with an animator's attention, watching how a dropped object bounces and settles, how a person's gait accelerates and decelerates while walking, how a door swings open and closes, builds an internal reference library that considerably improves your ability to judge whether a specific animated ease genuinely feels right or merely looks technically correct without actually feeling convincing.
Many professional motion designers recommend studying classical animation principles specifically, concepts originally developed for traditional hand drawn and stop motion animation but genuinely applicable to digital motion graphics work as well. Principles like anticipation, the idea that a motion often benefits from a small preparatory movement in the opposite direction before the main action begins, and follow through, the idea that secondary elements continue moving slightly after a primary motion has stopped, both build naturally on the same underlying easing concepts covered in this guide, extending them into a more complete framework for genuinely convincing animated motion.
For projects involving many animated layers working together, a title sequence with several text elements entering and exiting, or a complex infographic with multiple moving parts, maintaining consistent easing across every individual layer matters considerably for how cohesive the overall sequence ultimately feels. Selecting multiple layers simultaneously before applying the F9 shortcut applies the same base easing treatment across all of them at once, providing a consistent starting point that can then be individually fine tuned per layer as needed within the Graph Editor afterward.
This approach, applying a consistent baseline treatment first and then adjusting individual outliers afterward, tends to produce more cohesive results than adjusting each layer's easing independently from the very start, since it establishes a genuine baseline rhythm for the sequence before any individual variation is introduced on top of that established foundation.
For animators who also work with expressions, it is worth understanding that Easy Ease and expression driven animation represent two genuinely different approaches to controlling motion, and combining them requires some care. A property controlled entirely by an expression generally does not respond to keyframe easing in the same way, since the expression itself is actively calculating that property's value at every single frame rather than simply interpolating between two fixed keyframe values. For animators wanting eased motion on a property that would otherwise be expression driven, building the specific easing curve directly into the expression's own mathematical logic, or applying eased keyframes to a separate property the expression then references, are both common workarounds worth knowing about.
This distinction trips up newer users occasionally, expecting an expression driven property to respond to a Graph Editor adjustment the same way a purely keyframed property would, only to find the expression's own logic simply overrides whatever manual easing adjustment was attempted. Understanding this relationship upfront avoids genuine confusion later when working on more advanced projects that combine both keyframe based and expression based animation techniques within the same composition.
Natural, well eased motion pairs well with the kind of considered, professional feeling projects our own After Effects templates library is built around, giving you a head start on animation work you can further refine with the easing techniques covered here. Our free LUT library is also worth pairing with any motion graphics project needing a consistent color treatment across animated and static elements alike. For premium templates and additional creative assets, Motion Array and Envato are both worth browsing, and for music to pair with a finished, polished animation, Artlist and Epidemic Sound are both genuinely strong options.
F9, applied after selecting one or more keyframes in your Timeline panel. This instantly converts the selected keyframes to eased interpolation, indicated visually by the keyframe icon changing from a diamond shape to a rounded hourglass shape.
Yes, After Effects supports separate incoming and outgoing easing through dedicated shortcuts, letting you ease into a movement while leaving the stop abrupt, or the reverse, rather than only applying symmetric easing to both sides at once.
The default F9 easing curve is a solid general starting point but is not perfectly calibrated for every situation. Opening the Graph Editor and manually adjusting the specific ease curve often resolves motion that still feels slightly too abrupt or too gradual after the default has been applied.
No. Certain effects, scrolling tickers, continuous rotations, deliberately mechanical or glitch style motion, genuinely benefit from linear or hold interpolation instead. Applying Easy Ease indiscriminately to every keyframe regardless of context can soften motion that was meant to feel crisp or deliberate.
Easy Ease smooths a gradual transition between two different values, while a hold keyframe maintains a static value until an instant jump to the next keyframe's value, producing an entirely different, non transitional motion quality useful for stop motion or deliberately choppy effects.
Easy Ease is one of the simplest tools in After Effects to apply and one of the most consistently impactful for overall animation polish, turning mechanical, abrupt keyframe motion into something that reads as genuinely natural and considered with a single keystroke. Learning when to reach for it, when to leave motion linear instead, and how to fine tune a default ease through the Graph Editor when needed rounds out a foundational animation skill that pays off across nearly every future motion graphics project.
As with most fundamental skills, the real mastery here comes less from memorizing the specific keyboard shortcut and more from developing genuine judgment about which specific motion quality a given animation actually calls for, built gradually through practice, observation of real world movement, and a willingness to revisit and refine a default result rather than accepting the first pass as automatically finished.
Accessing the Timeline Panel:
Dive into the Timeline panel to see a list of your keyframes. This is where your animation starts to take shape.
Entering the Graph Editor:
Click on the Graph Editor button, and from the menu that appears, select "Edit Speed Graph." This tool allows you to visually adjust the speed and influence of your keyframes.
Selecting Your Keyframe:
Using the Selection tool, click on the keyframe you wish to adjust. Each keyframe represents a specific moment in your animation.
Splitting and Joining Direction Handles:
Direction handles control the speed and flow of your animation. To split the handles, use Alt-drag (Windows) or Option-drag (Mac OS). To join them back together, bring one handle close to its counterpart until they meet.
Adjusting Keyframe Speed and Influence:
Drag a keyframe with joined handles up to speed things up or down to slow things down. For split handles, dragging up accelerates the speed, and dragging down decelerates. To adjust the influence of the keyframe, pull the handle away or towards the keyframe's center.
The Magic of Easy Ease:
"Easy Ease" makes animations feel more natural. In the Graph Editor or layer bar mode, select the keyframes you want to apply this to. Choose from the options under Animation > Keyframe Assistant or use the buttons at the bottom of the Graph Editor.
Shortcut: Shift + F9
What It Does: Frankly, this is all about the beginning of your transition. It starts the animation slowly, then speeds up. It's perfect for objects that need a gradual start.
Shortcut: Ctrl + F9 (or Cmd + F9 on Mac)
What It Does: On the other hand, this focuses on the end of your transition. The animation starts at a regular speed but slows down towards the end. It's ideal for objects that need a gentle stop.
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