Timeline Control Quick Tips

Objective: Understanding the controls for Timeline!

This tutorial is going to help you have a thorough understanding of how Timeline works. We know what the play button is and the skip by frame or the skip to the end/beginning buttons are.

Underneath those you have your mode buttons. There is mix mode, ripple mode, and replace mode.

The standard mode is mix mode, it allows you to drag your clips around and ease into other clips.

Ripple mode will grab all of the Timelines on the path and move them around together.

In the standard mode, if you drop in a new clip it will stitch the clip to the side of the clips that are already there.

In replace mode it will cut right into the animations that are there.

The drop down button to the right allows you to choose between multiple timelines.

Let’s look at some quality of life scenarios. Let’s say you are working in the window and its really tightly zoomed in. You can use Alt + click and hold left mouse button to drag along the Timeline. This is easier then grabbing the sliding bar at the bottom.

If you are really zoomed in and you want to see all the clips you can frame them by pressing the A key. This will zoom out far enough for you to see all the clips available.

If you only want to see one of the clips in the window, select it and press the F key. This will frame that clip to fit in the window.

You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the window.

If you right click on the marker you can choose to adjust individual frames or you can move to the start of the ending frame or the start of the beginning frame.

If you have space between two clips and you want to reduce the space you can select both clips, right click and select “Tile” and that will reduce the space between the two.

Finally let’s look at curves. The button to the left of the record button is for curves. This displays the curves for each clip. If you go to a particular clip and you want to cut it in half simply press the S key. If you move the right half of the clip over you can see that the animation plays until the split then it hold until it has passed the gap and continues on.

Now you know the basics of the Timeline controls. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your own animations and I’ll see you in the next tutorial!