Timeline
The Timeline panel — transport, frame rate, work area, zoom, the row tree, and the ruler that scrubs the shot.
Reference
- Panel
- Timeline
- Menu
- Animation ▸ Show Timeline
The Timeline is the shot's time editor. It holds two kinds of animation side by side: cels, which are frame-by-frame drawings that hold until the next cel replaces them, and keyframes, which are values on a property channel that interpolate between one another. Both live in the same row tree.
The panel is a collapsible bar across the bottom of the workspace. It is opened from Animation ▸ Show Timeline; the same item reads Hide Timeline while the panel is open. The Timeline is docked and cannot be floated.
The panel
The header bar is always present. When the panel is collapsed it is 40 pt tall and shows only the
transport and a frame readout, f0. When it is open, the header's remaining controls sit in a
horizontal scroll view — the full control set is wider than a portrait screen — and the row tree
and track area appear below.
The tree is split into three columns: Layer (178 pt), Value (152 pt), and the track area, which fills the rest. Rows are 24 pt tall and the ruler is 22 pt.
Icon-only, at the far left: a chevron plus a film-stack glyph. The chevron points down while the panel is open and up while it is collapsed. Opening restores the panel to its last height.
When the panel is undocked it carries its own 13 pt drag capsule at the top edge, which resizes it between 160 pt and 820 pt; the default open height is 300 pt. In the dock the host supplies the height and the capsule is not drawn.
Transport
The transport buttons carry no text labels and are identified below by function. They remain visible when the panel is collapsed.
Pauses playback and moves the playhead to the work area's in point. When a focus range is set this is not frame 0.
Steps back to the previous cel boundary on the active draw target — not back one frame. On a held drawing this jumps to the start of the previous drawing.
Starts or stops playback. Playback requires a frame count greater than 1 and advances at
1 / fps seconds per frame. Starting playback arms the renderer's RAM preview cache and begins
audio on any video layers.
Steps forward to the next cel boundary on the active draw target.
Pauses playback and moves the playhead to the work area's out point.
The small yellow capsule at the end of the transport. Auto · Full · 1/2 · 1/4 — how large a picture playback composites and caches.
Halving or quartering it makes the first playback pass render that much faster and lets far more frames fit in the preview cache, which is how a heavy shot gets to real-time playback. Auto picks whatever scale lets the whole range fit. Export is always full quality, whatever this is set to.
Modes
The mode picker is a three-way segmented control, 190 pt wide. Selecting a mode also sets the graph editor's state, and the caption bar beneath the header restates what the mode is for.
The full dope sheet: every layer, cel and keyframe together. The graph editor is hidden. The caption reads "Compose · full dope sheet: every layer, cel & keyframe together — arrange the shot."
Shows the graph editor for the selected keyframe's channel. The caption reads "Keyframe · graph editor: shape the selected property's value curve (F-curve)." The graph editor has no separate toggle — it lives on this tab.
A flipbook view. The row tree is filtered to groups and rows that draw cels — layers, sub-layers and masks only — and Onion Skin is switched on. The caption reads "Draw · flipbook: only drawable cel tracks, onion skin on, ◀▶ steps drawing-to-drawing."
Cel and object buttons
These sit to the right of the mode picker as small bordered buttons. The cel operations themselves are described under Cels.
Icon-only. Steps the timeline's own undo history back. Disabled when that history is empty.
Icon-only. Steps the timeline's undo history forward.
Inserts a fresh blank cel at the playhead on the active draw target and moves the playhead to it.
Icon-only. Copies the drawing showing at the playhead into a new content bucket and places it as a cel at the playhead.
Icon-only. Empties the cel showing at the playhead without removing the cel slot.
Icon-only. Deletes the cel active at the playhead.
Opens the Generate Inbetween sheet. Disabled unless the current cel selection is a valid candidate — see Inbetweening.
Icon-only; the glyph is tinted when onion skin is on and grey when it is off. The menu holds the Onion Skin toggle and the two range steppers, documented under Cels.
Creates a null object, then expands and selects its row. See Parenting & Nulls.
Frame settings
Reads f<current>/<last>, monospaced, 58 pt wide. The second number is the frame count minus one.
The menu's label reads the current rate, for example 24 fps. Options are 12 fps, 24 fps,
25 fps, 30 fps and 60 fps. The underlying rate is clamped to 1–120. Changing the rate
while playback is running restarts it at the new interval.
Label reads <n>f beside a ruler glyph. Options are 24 frames, 48 frames, 60 frames,
120 frames, 240 frames, 480 frames, then Custom…. The count is clamped to at least
1, and the work range and playhead are re-clamped into the new length.
Opens an alert titled Total frames — "Set the timeline's total number of frames." — with a numeric field placeheld Frames and Set / Cancel buttons.
Icon-only; the glyph fills and tints when a focus range is set. Items are Set focus start → playhead, Set focus end → playhead, and Clear focus (full timeline). A focus range exists whenever the in point is past frame 0 or the out point is before the last frame.
Icon-only. Divides the zoom by 1.6. Disabled at minimum zoom; reaching 1× also resets the horizontal scroll.
Icon-only. Multiplies the zoom by 1.6.
The work area is drawn as an 11 pt strip with a capsule between the two end handles. Dragging the strip grabs whichever handle is nearer the touch. The transport's start and end buttons move to the work area's in and out points rather than to the first and last frames of the shot.
The ruler and the track area
The ruler carries the frame numbers and the playhead. Minor ticks are kept at least 12 px apart and labelled major ticks at least 58 px apart; the tick ladder steps through 1, 2, 5, 10 frames and then through multiples of the frame rate — one second, two, five, ten, thirty, sixty. The playhead draws as a 1.5 pt orange line through the ruler and the tracks.
Scrubs the playhead. The canvas follows at full frame rate; the published frame number updates at about 20 Hz so the rest of the interface does not thrash.
Zooms time between 1× and 16×, pivoting on the point where the pinch started. A pinch only engages past a 6 % dead band, and the playhead frame is held for the duration of the gesture.
Scrolls the zoomed timeline. It suppresses scrubbing and pinching for the duration, and undoes any scrub a concurrent touch had already applied.
Near a keyframe, moves the keyframe selection rigidly. Near a cel's end boundary, trims the cel. Anywhere else, pans the zoomed timeline horizontally.
Selects the nearest keyframe within about 9 pt and opens the ease bar.
Toggles that cel's selection.
Clears the keyframe selection.
Opens a context menu with a destructive Delete <row name> item.
The row tree
Rows are ordered groups first — each carrying its selected bones and its member layers — then ungrouped layers, then nulls, then particle emitters, and finally Shot Camera, which is always present and always last. Indentation is 11 pt per level. A selected owner row is tinted.
| Row | Title | Twirls into |
|---|---|---|
| Group | The group's name | Its bones and member layers |
| Layer | The layer's name | Transform, Effects, and any of Draw-In, Warp, Puppet, Bones, Vector Shapes, Text |
| Sub-layer | The sub-layer's name | Opacity and its own Effects stack only |
| Mask | Mask | The same property sections a drawable row carries |
| Null | The null's name | Transform, without Opacity |
| Particle emitter | The effect's name | Transform and Particles |
| Shot camera | Shot Camera | The camera's own property rows |
Sub-layers are two-dimensional on their parent's plane, which is why they expose Opacity and effects but no transform of their own. The Bones section is titled "Bones — tap bones on canvas to show" until bones are picked, and "Bones (n selected)" afterwards: only selected bones are listed, so a full character does not flood the tree.
The property rows themselves, and what each one keys, are enumerated under Keyframes.
The Value column
Every property row shows its current value in the Value column, in a field style chosen by the property's type.
| Style | Fields | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Position | X, Y, Z | Whole units |
| Scale | X, Y, Z | Two decimals |
| Angle | Z only, degrees | 1x +45° — revolutions and degrees, range −36000 to 36000 |
| Euler angles | X, Y, Z, degrees | As above, on all three axes |
| Percent | One field | 0%–100% |
| Effect | One field | Whole numbers when the span exceeds 10, two decimals otherwise |
| Colour | A colour well | — |
| Toggle | A checkmark, filled when on | Writes 0 or 1 |
Rotation is displayed as revolutions plus degrees: 405° reads 1x +45°, −30° reads 0x -30°, and
−390° reads -1x -30°.
A value field is a scrubbable number. Drag it vertically to scrub the value; the sensitivity is 1 unit per point for positions and angles, 0.01 for scale, 0.5 for percentages, and one two-hundredth of the span for effect parameters. Tap the field instead and an alert titled Enter value opens with a Value field and Set / Cancel buttons — an alert rather than an inline field, so the keyboard cannot cover the timeline.
Toggle rows write 0 or 1 through the same path as any other scalar, which means an animated toggle always keys with stepped interpolation.