Animation Timeline

The animatable properties.

Numeric channels are unitless; colour channels take CSS colour strings. A keyframe is a time from the phase start (stored in seconds, shown in the timeline's time display), a value, and optionally its own easing for the segment that follows.

Each lane runs on its own keys. A scale lane can overshoot and settle in 0.3 s while the position lane glides for 0.6 s, and each segment keeps its own easing. The transform lanes are combined in a fixed order — perspective, position, the component's resting rotation, scale, then rotation — so a 3D turn never throws the component off its position.

• Add channel and Remove channel manage lanes (the timeline's + Track adds one too); custom channels are hand-authored rather than generated.
• Lanes can be renamed, tinted with an accent colour and reordered by dragging their name; each lane draws its value as a curve, and colour lanes show the colour they hold.
• Drag a key to move it; double-click a key to put the playhead on it. Each track's ◀ ◆ ▶ buttons jump to its previous key, key it at the playhead, and jump to its next key. Enter keys the selected tracks (all of them when none is selected) with the value they already have there.
• The ruler scrubs; the green and red markers are the clip's start and end, and dragging the red one (or typing in the end field) changes the clip's length.
• Two playheads: the orange one is the editor canvas, which Timeline Play previews on; the red PGM line is where program is in the clip — a take, the context menu's Play Animation, a control or a chained clip — as the rundown's PGM monitor and the Output tab play it. PGM is read-only and holds at the end when the clip holds its last frame. A popped-out Timeline shows both.
• ⌘/Ctrl + scroll zooms about the pointer; − / + zoom and Fit shows the whole clip.

The timeline reads time as frames at the page's rate (0042 at 50 fps), seconds, or SS:FF timecode — switch it on the timeline's toolbar or in Settings › Canvas › Timeline. Zoomed in on frames or timecode, every frame is drawn as its own cell, numbered once there is room, and the current frame's cell is filled from the ruler down through the tracks. Time fields accept any form: 42 or 42f is frames, 1.5s is seconds, 01:12 is timecode. With snapping on (the magnet), dragged keys, the scrubbed playhead and the clip end land on whole frames; hold Alt while dragging to place freely. Clips are still stored in seconds, so changing the page's frame rate never moves a key.