Timeline & graph editor

Calm by default

Every layer is one row, showing a single neutral block that summarises where its keyframes live. That is the whole timeline until you ask for more.

To see inside a layer, either:

• click the disclosure chevron, which shows the full property tree, or
• press U, which reveals only the properties that have keyframes.

Either way the track splits into one sub-row per property, each with draggable keyframe diamonds.

Row controls

• Keyframe diamonds — drag to retime, marquee-select several, copy, paste, delete.
• Layer bars — drag to move the layer in time, edge-drag to trim, split at the playhead.
• Clip waveforms — audio and video bars draw the envelope of the sound they will play, sliced to that clip’s own source window, so trimming or slipping redraws it. A speaker glyph shows and toggles that layer’s audio mute, separately from the visibility eye, which hides the picture. See Audio.
• Search filter, shy toggle, and solo / lock / visibility columns.
• Work-area in/out markers and composition markers.
• Transport — play/pause, jump to start or end, frame step, loop. It lives in the timeline header, beside the tools that change what you are looking at, rather than in a bar of its own.

Label colours do two jobs

A layer’s label colour is not only a stripe in the tree:

• The layer’s outline on the canvas is drawn in its label colour. On a busy composition that is how you tell which selected thing is which without reading the tree.
• One command selects every layer sharing a label — and “no label” is a first-class choice, not a gap. Sweeping up the untagged layers is how you find the ones you forgot to tag.

Colour a group, then act on the group. Without the second half the palette is just decoration.

Markers

Both are readable from expressions through marker.*, which is usually more legible than hard-coding times — the timing stays visible on the ruler where you can drag it.

The graph editor

Toggle it with Shift + G. It replaces the track rows and fills the panel below the header toolbar, rather than sliding in as a short strip underneath them — a curve needs height to be read in. The timeline is hidden rather than unmounted, so its scroll position survives the toggle.

Two modes:

Value draws each animated property’s curve as an SVG Bézier path. Drag a keyframe horizontally to retime it, vertically to change its value; drag its handles to reshape the easing.

Speed draws the derivative — the rate of change. It is read-only vertically, on purpose: a Y position in speed mode is a speed, not a value, so dragging it would be ambiguous. Use it to find the moment a move actually feels fast, then fix it in Value mode.

Timeline shortcuts

Reveal and keyframe chords

Pressing U twice reveals animated properties across all layers.

Related

• Keyframes — what a track actually is, and the time-axis rule that matters
• Easing — interpolation and the ease clipboard