Adding/subtracting frames in a timeline – why is it so hard?

[Mark Clarkson]

Dave,
Thanks – I love shortcuts and am always willing to learn more (though I do know that one), but I don’t think that helps me in my example case. Well – maybe a little.

I may have been unclear; the idea was not to simply extend the first bitmap layer by one second, but to push *everything* back one second, so that the first bitmap runs one second longer, but the comp is extended by one second, so the second bitmap doesn’t lose any time.

And the keyframes in the changing text layer still need to be pushed right one second or, at least, some of them do, to match the new timing.

This is something I have to do all the time, and it’s killing me.

mark clarkson – http://www.markclarkson.com

[Darby Edelen]

[mclarkson] “In AE, I have to grab the endpoint of the first bitmap and pull it out, or drag the whole thing to the right in the timeline and extend the start point. Then I have to slide all of the second bitmap to the right one second, making sure I keep they

[Mark Clarkson]

It doesn’t sound like I’m really “missing” anything; it sounds like there’s no straightforward way to do this. I don’t want to sound argumentative – that’s not my intention – and I’m not interesting in attacking or defending the way AE does things. I just want to make sure I’m not missing out on something.

It does seem like there’s a chunk of functionality missing here, though. It seems like other people would be constantly saying,

[Darby Edelen]

[mclarkson] “AE

[Mark Clarkson]

Darby (and everyone),
Thanks for your input and advice. I’ve actually been using AE *and* Flash for many years, although my use of AE has been pretty casual. AE and Flash actually remind me a lot of each other, in terms of how projects are built up, how they are displayed and worked with, the use of layers, etc. etc. And, goodness knows, there are things in AE that I really miss when I’m working in Flash.
But the thing that drives me the most nuts in AE is the subject of this thread. As I said, I kept thinking I must be missing something simple (it’s certainly happened before) and that’s why I was the only person on Earth who found adding and subtracting chunks of time to a composition to be a major PITA. It was my hope that, in response to my thread, someone would say, “Geez, you just put the playhead at X and hit Cmd+Shift+somekey. N00b!”
That appears to not be the case, so I will keep manually dragging layers, and start and end points, and keyframes around. I do maintain that this is one place where Flash has it all over AE.
Thanks again.

mark clarkson – http://www.markclarkson.com

[Jeff Mcbride]

If I understand right one of your difficulties is that when you extend something by a second everything else is now a second off? If you do that multiple times it’s a pain. The answer to that is to select everything and go to Animation-> Keyframe Assistant-> Sequence Layers. This will allow you to push everything out to each others in/out points.

As far as extending/shrinking, Dave is right, just use option/alt [ or ] to set a new in/out for a layer. To move the keyframes just grab the end keyframes and drag them to the end holding shift, they’ll lock in place. If you have keyframes in the middle that will get screwed up you can sometimes set them to roving keyframes (Right-Click the keyframe, go to Keyframe Interpolation, then set Roving to Rove Across Time) This will move the keyframes in the middle to stretch to the time. It may or may not work depending on your case.

Hope that helps.

[Mark Clarkson]

Thanks, everyone, for you tips and input.

mark clarkson – http://www.markclarkson.com