Timeline Tour

• The Timeline
• Timeline Top Bar
• Tracks and Keyframes
  • Attribute Tracks
• Scene Switcher
• Quick Scene Setup

The Timeline

The Timeline, situated at the bottom of the Module Editor, can be opened in either of two ways:

1. Click Timeline in the Top Bar ->.
2. Switch to Animation Mode -> in the Right Sidebar.

Whenever the Timeline is opened, the editor switches to Animation Mode ->.

Timeline Top Bar

Along the top of the Timeline runs the Timeline Top Bar. It contains 5 important tools:

• Scene Switcher ¹: Displays the currently active Scene, and when clicked allows switching the timeline to a different scene.
• Play/Pause Button ²: Plays or pauses animation playback.
• Playhead ³: Shows current playback time, and allows manually scrubbing through the timeline.
• Ruler ⁴: Displays the seconds elapsed at each point of the timeline.
• Marker Handler ⁵: Allows you to add markers to the timeline as a visual aid.

Tracks and Keyframes

For every layer in the current Slide there is a corresponding animation Track in the timeline. On each Track is one or more animation Keyframes.

A Track can be selected by clicking it directly, or by selecting the corresponding layer via the Stage or the Layers Sidebar. The selected Track will be highlighted purple ¹.

Within a Track you can also select a specific Keyframe. The selected Keyframe will be a brighter purple with a white handle at its right or left end ². When a Keyframe is selected, it can be edited in the Animation Mode sidebar.

Dragging a Keyframe will move it, thereby changing when its animation runs.

Dragging a white end handle changes the length of the keyframe, and hence the duration of its animation.

Attribute Tracks

Some animations split layer attributes into their own tracks, where they can have their properties set independently.

For example, this “Headline” layer directly targets the words in the text for animation, and as such gets a Words attribute track ¹.

Learn more about animation attribute targets in the Advanced Mode section of our Animation Mode Tour ->.

Scene Switcher

Scenes are self-contained animation sequences that can be played one after the other in a Slide.

When the Scene Switcher is opened it displays a list of the Scenes in the current Slide.

There are always at least two scenes: In Animation and Out Animation, listed in the Default section ¹. Every slide starts by playing the In Animation scene and ends by playing the Out Animation scene.

Any custom scenes will be listed in the Action Triggered section ². These scenes don’t play by default, rather they can be triggered by creating Scene Actions ->.

Click the + Add a new scene button ³ to create additional custom scenes through the Quick Scene Setup modal. You can create as many custom scenes as you want.

Hovering over a custom scene in the scene switcher will display a button to delete the scene ¹, and a button to open the scene’s settings ².

In the scene settings box is a field to rename the scene ¹ and a setting to control how it is previewed ².

Quick Scene Setup

Clicking the + Add a new scene button in the Scene Switcher opens the Quick Scene Setup modal.

In the first setting you can configure the Scene Name ¹.

In the Affected Layers setting you can select the layers you wish to be included in the new scene ², which opens a dropdown list to choose from. (See below).

The third setting ³ configures whether your scene will move the IN (Play IN option) or OUT (Play OUT option) animations for the affected layers into the scene, vs creating an entire fresh scene (Custom Scene option).

Finally, the + Add Scene button ⁴ creates the scene as configured.

The Affected Layers setting opens a dropdown list where you can select layers from the current scene by checking the box on the left side. You can can also search for layers by name.