Original subtitles

- [Pierre] As any Blender editor,

you can navigate in the timeline using your middle mouse.

You can move selected items by pressing G,

you can scale them using S,

which will push them further from the play head.

But pressing R won't rotate the key frame.

What it will do instead,

it will all you to change the key frame type.

Changing the key frame type won't affect your animation.

It's only a visual modification of your key frames

that may allow you to better organize your animation.

I personally never use it (drowned out by whooshing)

Pressing the zero key on the numpad

will center your timeline position around the play head.

When you have some key selected,

pressing the dot key on the numpad

will frame or focus the selection.

Pressing the home key will frame the whole animation

from the very first to the very last key frame.

You can preview a part of your animation by pressing P

and dragging and hold on the section you want to repeat.

Press Alt + P to clear the preview.

You can activate the preview range

by clicking the clock icon

and then setting the starting and ending frame.

You can set the beginning of your animation,

pressing Control + Home.

And you can set the end by pressing Control + Home.

When you activate the preview range

with the clock icon is using Control + Home

and Control + Home, will set the beginning and the end

of the preview range.

My timeline here is just showing me

the key frame of the selected items.

If I go into view and uncheck only key frames

from selected object,

every key frame in the scene will be displayed.

My character currently I've a subdivision modifier.

If I go to the rendering properties,

I can see that simplify has been activated.

It allows you to disable every subdivision modifier

in the scene, increasing the playback performances.

When deactivated, we can see that my frame range

in the top left corner turned to red

meaning that Blender is not able to reach the frame rate

I've set previously.

While this scene is supposed to run at 30 frames per second,

here I am below 14 frames per second.

While it is not optimal,

Blender allow us to drop frames

so that we have a bit sort of timing of the animation,

meaning that it will drop some of the frame

to make sure that the action run at the same speed

as if we were displaying the 30 frames per seconds.

To allow this, just go to the playback option,

to the no sync and choose whether frame drop or AV sync.

We can see that the animation timing has changed

and it's trying to catch up with its regular speed.

Hopefully you won't need to use this option

as I will try to provide pretty low poly characters

to be animated, but it's important to note it.

With Control + Shift, plus left click,

you can select all the keys after or before the play head.

You can press B click and drag or just left click and drag

to make a box selection.

The timeline is mainly here

to give you an overview of your animation.

I never use it to work on my current key frame.

The summary line is just here to let me know

if there are a key frame on the current frame.

Here, we can see we have a key frame on every single frame

from zero to 30.

This key frame belongs to different controller

of our character and are stored into an action

that is torn into the armature.

We will discuss about armature later on,

here I just want to show you the IRO key of the timeline.

If I add a cube to the scene and add key frames to this cube

you can see that now these keys are also displayed

in the timeline.

Selecting a key on the summary

will select all the corresponding keys

of the armature and the cube.

This can be great to offset a whole set of keys.

But if we want, we can only move, for example,

the X location key of the cube.

Another great feature of the timeline

is that we can add markers.

While you can use them only for organization's sake,

they can be very useful to switch camera.

When you add two camera into your Blender scene

and press zero to go into camera view,

you can switch from one camera to the other

into the scene options.

But if you will, you can go in the timeline

and add a couple of markers.

You can add them pressing M or going to Marker, Add Marker.

Now, with one of my camera selected

and one of the marker selected,

I will go to marker and bind camera to marker.

Now I will select the second marker,

select the second camera and repeat the process

or press Control + B in the timeline.

In the 3D viewport, pressing zero,

I will jump into camera view.

And when I will play the animation,

each time I will hit those marker,

Blender will automatically switch to the bound camera.

This is way easier and cleaner

than trying to animate the camera.

To summarize, we have seen that navigating the timeline

is close to navigating any Blender editors.

We have seen a bunch of different shortcuts.

And we have seen that we can create different markers

in the timeline and bind the multiple cameras to them

so that we can jump from one camera to the other

directly through the animation.