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.
• Timeline tools — Selection, Razor, Slip, Slide and Roll, a snapping magnet, and the transition palette, in the panel’s own toolbar row. See Cutting clips.
• Transport — play/pause, jump to start or end, frame step, loop. It is the transport bar under the stage, with the viewport it drives.
• The timecode readout is a field. Click it and type 1:04, 320f, 2.5s or +10 to go there.
• The time navigator over the lanes is a window, not a fill: drag its body to pan, its ends to zoom, double-click to fit the composition.

Editing many rows at once

Since 0.8.5 the timeline is built for moving a lot of things together.

• Range select. Shift-click a second row to select the whole span between it and the first. Ctrl/⌘-click toggles a single row in or out; Ctrl/⌘ + Shift-click adds a span to what is already selected.
• Group drag. Drag any selected layer bar and the whole selection moves as one block, keeping the gaps between the bars. The move is a single undo step.
• Stagger. With two or more layers selected, Animation ▸ Stagger Layers… offsets them one after another. Choose whether to move the layer bars (when each layer starts) or to shift each layer’s animation in place; pick a pattern — Cascade, Zigzag, From Center, Wave or Random (random is seeded, so it is the same every time) — and a step in frames, set the order, and choose whether the first layer stays put or the spread is centred on where the selection already sits. The dialog previews the total spread.
• Zoom under the pointer. Ctrl/⌘ + wheel over the lanes zooms around the point of time under the pointer, so the keyframe you are looking at stays where it is instead of sliding away. The zoom runs from 4 to 4,000 pixels per second.
• Sub-frame placement. Keyframe and bar times are continuous, and at the higher zoom levels a millisecond is a few pixels wide, so you can drop a key or a bar between frames — which is what cutting to a beat needs.

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 + F3. 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 shows every modified property, as in After Effects: animated, driven by an expression, or simply set away from its default.

Related

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