- Getting started
- About animation
- Understanding the project file
- Animating position
- Changing the pacing and timing
- Animating transparency
- Animating filters
- Animating transformations
- Editing multiple frames
- Changing the path of the motion
- Swapping tween targets
- Creating nested animations
- Easing
- Frame-by-frame animation
- Animating 3D motion
- Exporting your final movie
- Review questions
- Review answers
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Changing the pacing and timing
You can change the duration of the entire tween span or change the timing of the animation by dragging keyframes on the timeline.
Changing the animation duration
If you want the animation to proceed at a slower pace (and thus take up a much longer period of time), you need to lengthen the entire tween span between the beginning and end keyframes. If you want to shorten the animation, you need to decrease the tween span. Lengthen or shorten a motion tween by dragging its ends on the timeline.
Move your mouse pointer close to the end of the tween span in the city layer.
Your pointer changes to a double-headed arrow, indicating that you can lengthen or shorten the tween span.
Drag the end of the tween span back to frame 60.
Your motion tween shortens to 60 frames, reducing the time it takes the cityscape to move.
Move your pointer close to the beginning of the tween span (at frame 1).
Drag the beginning of the tween span forward to frame 10.
Your motion tween begins at a later time, so it now plays only from frame 10 to frame 60.
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Adding frames
You’ll want the last keyframe of your motion tween to hold for the remainder of the animation. Add frames by Shift-dragging the end of a tween span.
Move your pointer close to the end of the tween span.
Hold down the Shift key and drag the end of the tween span forward to frame 191. Make sure that your tween span is not selected.
The last keyframe in the motion tween remains at frame 60, but Animate adds frames through frame 191.
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Moving keyframes
If you want to change the pacing of an animation, you can select individual keyframes and then drag them to new positions.
Click the keyframe at frame 60.
The keyframe at frame 60 is selected. Begin dragging the keyframe. A tiny box appears next to your mouse pointer, indicating that you can move the keyframe.
Drag the keyframe to frame 40.
Now, because the last keyframe in the motion tween is reached earlier in the animation, the motion of the cityscape proceeds more quickly.
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SPAN-BASED VS. FRAME-BASED SELECTION
By default, Animate uses frame-based selection, which means you can select individual frames within a motion tween. However, if you prefer to click a motion tween and have the entire span (the beginning and end keyframes and all the frames in between) be selected, you can enable Span Based Selection from the Frame View menu in the upper-right corner of the Timeline panel (or you can Shift-click to select the entire span).
With Span Based Selection enabled, you can click anywhere within the motion tween to select it, and move the whole animation backward or forward along the timeline as a single unit.
If you want to select individual keyframes while Span Based Selection is enabled, hold down Command/Ctrl and click a keyframe.
MOVING KEYFRAMES VS. CHANGING TIME IN TWEEN SPANS
Managing the timing of your animation by moving keyframes and stretching or squashing tween spans can sometimes be frustrating because you will get different outcomes depending on what you’ve selected on the timeline and how you drag those selections.
If you want to simply move the location of a keyframe within a tween span, make sure that only a single keyframe is selected and that the tiny box appears next to your pointer as you begin dragging the keyframe to a new location.
If you want to select individual keyframes while Span Based Selection is enabled, hold down the Command/Ctrl key and click a keyframe.
Consider the following animation, where a ball moves from the left side of the Stage to the bottom edge and then to the right side, making a figure “V.” On the timeline, three keyframes mark the three positions of the ball.
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Moving the middle keyframe changes the timing of when the ball hits the bottom of the Stage.
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When you select a span of frames within a tween, you can compress or expand its duration by dragging the selection when the double-headed arrow appears near the right edge of the selection. A black flag appears indicating when the amount of compression or expansion is a multiple of the original length (x0.5, x2, x4, etc.).
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UNDERSTANDING FRAME RATE
The speed of your animation is tied to the frame rate of your document (shown in the Properties section of the Properties panel with the Document tab selected), but do not modify the frame rate to change the speed or duration of your animation.
The frame rate determines how many frames on the timeline make up 1 second of time. The default is either 30 or 24 frames per second (fps). The seconds are marked on the timeline. Frame rate is a measure of how smooth an animation appears—the higher the frame rate, the more frames there are to show the action. Animations at slower frame rates appear choppy because there are fewer frames to show the action. Slow-motion videography depends on very high frame rates to capture action that happens very quickly, such as a speeding bullet or a falling water droplet.
If you want to modify the overall duration or speed of your animation, don’t change the frame rate. Instead, add frames to, or delete frames from, your timeline.
If you want to change the frame rate but keep the overall duration constant, select the Scale Spans option in the Properties panel before you modify the frame rate.
