The timeline
Adding, duplicating, reordering, and playing back frames.
The timeline runs along the bottom of the workshop. The strip of thumbnails is your animation in order, left to right, and the controls above it decide how it plays.
Frames
Click any thumbnail to jump to that frame. The counter to the right of the play button tells you where you are.
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Add a blank frame | The dashed button at the end of the strip, or N |
| Duplicate the current frame | The duplicate button, top right of the timeline |
| Delete the current frame | The bin button, top right of the timeline |
| Previous frame | ← |
| Next frame | → |
New and duplicated frames are inserted directly after the current one, not at the end, so you can work into the middle of a sequence without shuffling anything afterwards.
Duplicate, do not add
Most of the time you want duplicate rather than add. Animation is mostly small changes to the frame before, so starting from a copy and altering it is faster than redrawing from nothing, and it keeps the parts that should not move from drifting around.
Reach for a blank frame when the next drawing genuinely shares nothing with the last one, such as a hard cut.
Deleted a frame you wanted? Ctrl Z brings it back, with its drawing intact and in its old position. The same goes for adding, duplicating, and reordering.
Reordering
Drag a thumbnail along the strip to move it. The frame you are hovering shows a ring to mark where it will land. Release to drop.
Playback
Space plays and pauses. Playback loops until you stop it, which is the point: a loop that reads well on repeat is the goal, and watching it once tells you very little.
Onion skins are hidden during playback, so what you see is what you will export.
Pausing returns you to the frame you were on when you pressed play, rather than leaving you wherever the playhead stopped.
Frame rate
Three rates are available: 12, 24, and 30 frames per second. This is a property of the whole animation, not of individual frames.
| Rate | What it means |
|---|---|
| 12 | The traditional choice for hand drawn animation. Half as many drawings, and it still reads as motion. Start here. |
| 24 | Film rate. Smoother, and twice the work. |
| 30 | Video rate. Smoothest, and the most drawings. |
Twelve is where almost everyone should start. Hand drawn animation has run at twelve for a century because the eye fills in the gaps, and because drawing thirty frames per second of finished work is how projects die.
The rate changes how fast your existing frames play. It does not add or remove drawings, so moving from 12 to 24 will run your loop twice as fast rather than making it smoother.