Keyframe assistants
Bulk operations on keyframes and layer timing. All of them are in the top-bar Animate menu; the easing ones are also in the Animation menu bar entry.
Easy Ease
| Chord | Effect |
|---|---|
| F9 | Ease both sides of the selected keyframes |
| Shift + F9 | Ease in only |
| Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + F9 | Ease out only |
Easy Ease All in the Animate menu applies it to every keyframe on the selection at once — the fastest way to de-mechanise an animation you built with linear keys.
Time-Reverse Keyframes
Reverses the selected keyframes in time. The values stay; the order flips.
The obvious use is turning an entrance into an exit. Apply the entrance preset, duplicate the keyframes later in the timeline, and reverse the copy.
Bounce
In the Graph panel rather than the Animate menu, because it generates keyframes rather than re-easing the ones you have.
| Parameter | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Bounces | How many rebounds to add after the original landing |
| Elasticity | The fraction of each overshoot the next one keeps — it scales the duration by the same factor, which is what makes it read as gravity rather than as a wobble |
| Oscillate | A spring overshoots both ways around the resting value; gravity only ever rebounds back the way it came |
| Squash & stretch | Opt-in, and a different property — it counter-scales against each impact rather than moving the layer |
It works two ways: append a bounce to an animation you already have, or build the fall and the bounce from a static layer so it drops in from off-screen. Named starting points are offered as styles.
A bounce cannot be an easing curve. A cubic bezier is one curve with at most a single overshoot; a bounce is N overshoots of shrinking amplitude. Any preset called “bounce” in an easing list is really an ease-out-back — generating keyframes is the only honest way to do this short of an expression.
Exponential Scale
Converts a linear scale animation into an exponential one. Scale reads as constant-speed to the eye only when it changes by a constant ratio per frame, not a constant number — which is why a linearly keyframed zoom appears to slow down as it grows.
Sequence Layers
Lays the selected layers’ bars end to end, so each starts where the previous one finishes. Useful for shot-style sequences and for anything that should play one-at-a-time rather than together.
Overlap is reachable, and with it a real cross-dissolve: the layers overlap by the duration you give, and the opacity keyframes to hand over across it rather than cutting.
Motion Sketch
Records a layer’s position by dragging it in real time. What lands is ordinary keyframes, so smooth the path or thin the keyframes afterwards like any others.
The puppet equivalent records pin movement the same way — see Puppet pins.
Scaling a selection in time
Select keyframes and scale them about an anchor: the whole animation gets faster or slower while the relative spacing between keys is preserved. This is the one to use when an animation is right but too slow — retiming keyframe by keyframe drifts the rhythm.
Stagger Animations
Offsets each selected layer’s start by a fixed amount — 0.3 s by default.
This is the workhorse for card grids, lists and menus: apply one preset to every card, select them all, stagger. Keeping the ease identical and varying only the timing is what makes a group read as one movement.
Order matters. The offset is applied in selection order, so select from the one that should move first.
Smooth Motion Path
Ctrl/⌘ + Alt + S.
Smooths the spatial path of the selected layers’ animated position, removing the corners you get from keyframes that were placed by hand.
Keyframe interpolation
Animation → Keyframe Interpolation → Linear and → Hold set the interpolation type on the selection directly, bypassing the ease presets.
Hold is worth remembering: it makes a property jump rather than travel, which is how you do stepped motion, hard property cuts, and frame-by-frame swaps.
The ease clipboard is not an assistant, but it belongs here
The Graph panel’s ease clipboard — Copy and Paste — moves a cubic-Bézier ease from one keyframe to any number of others, across properties and layers. In practice it does more for consistency than any of the assistants above. See Easing.