There are square handles at the beginning and end of every bar. You can drag these to scale all of the keys in the bar.

Adjusting Hierarchy

You can drag item names up and down to change the order and hierarchy (i.e., parent/child relationships). As you drag, a yellow insert line will appear. You insert the item by releasing your mouse button at the line’s position. The line will cycle between different lengths as you drag; the different lengths indicate different levels of hierarchy. The relative length indicates the level the line becomes when you release the mouse button.

Effects of Selections

You can select a contiguous range of (same type) items by holding the Shift key down as you select. Hold the Ctrl key down to select/unselect non-contiguous items.

You can then drag the entire selected range of items to a new hierarchical position. Most of the editing functions can be limited to selected items only. These items will also be highlighted in the viewports.

Adding Audio

You can sync your animation to sound: from the Audio pop-up menu, load a reference audio file (WAV format) that you can hear when you play the scene. A simple waveform is shown behind the time slider on the main interface. You can scrub though the audio by dragging the timeline slider or preview the audio by selecting Play Audio. Use the Clear Audio option to clear the audio from the scene.

The Fixed Frequency option keeps the audio from changing pitch when you scrub the frame slider.

You can delay the start time of a loaded audio file by selecting Audio Start Time from the Audio pop-up menu. The value you enter into the dialog is the delay amount in seconds (e.g., if Frames Per Second, on the General Options Tab of the Preferences Panel, is set at 30, entering 1.0 starts your audio at frame 30).

Classic Scene Editor Buttons

Use the Favorites pop-up menu to create (or delete) selection sets for items that you want to access quickly. For example, if you always move the same five lights, you could multi-select them and make a favorite. Then, the next time you want to move them, you just select the favorites set you created and all five lights are selected automatically.

The Select pop-up menu lets you quickly select all items based on their type. To unselect a group of items, just click on any item. (One item is always selected.)

The Visibility pop-up menu will show/hide selected or all items.

The Colors pop-up menu will apply the selected color to all of the selected items. You can also set the default colors and apply them to the scene.

The Channels pop-up menu will expand/collapse selected or all items.

With Shift Keys you can Shift keyframes for all or just selected items forward or backward in time. The Low Frame and High Frame values set the range of frames to be affected. This function lets you fine-tune the animation without making individual changes for each item in the scene (a potentially tedious task). Enter a negative Shift Frames by value to shift backwards in time.

Some operations can affect frames outside the specified range. For example, shifting a range of frames in the middle of a motion path will cause keyframes after the range to shift so they are not overlapped by the newly shifted keyframes.

With Scale Keys you can extend or shorten either the duration of all or just selected items. The Low Frame and High Frame values set the range of frames to be affected. The result is that events occur either more slowly or more quickly, as they have been scaled to take place over a longer or shorter period of time. Scale Keys enables you to fine-tune the animation, allowing certain events or the entire animation to take place within a specified time frame so that you do not need to alter specific keyframes manually. The Scale Time by value represents the scaling factor with 1 being equal to 100 percent.