Is there a way to manually change the scale of the animation timeline? i.e. how many seconds can fit on screen at once.
I can see from different screens I've got that the scale differs from one to another (in one screen I can see 4 seconds of the timeline at once, in another a seconds takes up half the timeline and I can only see 2 seconds at once).
Hi Ross,
When you are looking at the Animation Timeline, you can manually set the duration by right clicking on a specific item and then set a Duration in milliseconds on the context menu. You can drag the end of an item as well and extend or shorten the duration. If you drag the item itself you will update the Duration Start in milliseconds.
As for scaling the timeline, there is a scroll bar on the bottom of the Animation Timeline panel that pops up when you hover over the bottom of the panel, assuming one of your durations is greater than can be shown. The scroll bar depends on the current duration values. For instance set one of the duration to 8000 ms and you will then be able to stroll right and see the extent of that duration.
Please let me know if this answers your question.
Hi Marianne
That isn't exactly what I mean. I want to be able to zoom in or out of the timeline to be able to see a longer or shorter duration on my screen at once.
If you look at the screenshot in the link below, you can see that there are just over 4 seconds of the timeline visible. I would like to be able to zoom out so that I can see more seconds at once, or zoom in to see fewer seconds at once.
Screenshot link: https://i.imgur.com/nkTeyA0.png
(I didn't insert the image into this reply because it is so wide that it gets cropped)
hi, Ross.
I think I understood your question. May I ask a related one, as it will help the team check our assumptions?
The reason we defined the bounds as 4s is because in user-interaction driven transitions, 4s felt like years. Would you be able to share some example from the web or in your experience where long animations are useful in prototypes? It's entirely possible that we skipped considering some scenario.
Funny bit is that we used to have something like a zoom on the timeline when we were designing Indigo Studio. However, as we started creating prototypes, we ended up dealing with milliseconds more than seconds. For example, a push transition is around 250-350 ms. Anything longer made the interface look sluggish and got in the way of the user when we were usability testing prototypes.
It's also possible that you are not asking for creating transitions that last more than 4s, but more about being able to zoom in to fine tune the duration by directly dragging the resizes. At the fixed zoom level, is it proving to be difficult to grab the resize handles for durations less than 250ms?
Hi George
The situation that first became difficult to deal with the timeline zoo level was in fact a very unusual one, that I wouldn't expect to come across very often. I'm prototyping a UI for a sort of puzzle where something changes every second for 10 seconds and then changes to a new puzzle. It was becoming quite difficult to add new segments and change the duration of each.
It is quite a fun project but it's a highly unusual situation and one that I don't think you should prioritise. I only asked because I'm sure in some screens I saw, the default 'scale' of the timeline (i.e. how many seconds were visible at once) seemed to change, leading me to believe it could be altered manually. Inevitably, I haven't been able to replicate that though and it's entirely possible that I imagined it :)
I would say that for the vast majority of cases, you've got it spot on.
Something I would like (probably best addressed with a different request but I'll note it here since we're talking about it) is the ability to insert segments into the timeline. Quite often in more normal projects, I find that I want to insert an animation segment, either because I made a mistake and missed something, or simply running the prototype reveals a need for something. But I can't do that and I end up having to delete the interaction and sometimes all the downstream states and start again. That can be quite time consuming. It seems that one can only append segments, not insert. I'd love the ability to insert.
Thanks for your time,
Ross