Now the final two colons, I'm not going to touch those for now. Those are going to come up in later lessons as this icon up here for the brand new graph editor inside after effects. We are not even dealing with key frame animation at this point. So, we are not going to go into that function. But what we do have though are a few more options down on the lower edge of the timeline.
In the middle here, we have the ability to change the zoom of the display of the timeline. Now, this is actually base around the current time indicator. So, I'm just going to move it down here to roundabout one second at this point and if we come down here and drag the preview to increase it.
You will notice that we are staying focus on that one second. Now, it is not moving much because there is only one second here but if we drag this down all the way back to zero. Let us move the time indicator more towards the other end, five - six seconds across whatever you feel, dragging that will now zoom up on that particular point in time, and you will see that the rest of the timeline has effectively zoom off the left hand side.
Now, you can also use the icons here to click up and down in terms of zooms size. But there is a shortcut that makes all of these much quicker and easier. That is simply to hit the “Minus Key” of the “Plus Key” on your keyboard, right next to the number zero and right next to the “Delete Key” as well. So, on the main keyboard not the keypad, hitting “Minus (-)” or “Plus(+)” will allow you to zoom down or even zoom up on the timeline very easily and quickly.
Now, we use this more later on once we start adding key adding key frames at the time line. You often wants to zoom in and see them in much more details you can get that timing right. For now, let us just hit the home key again to go back to the beginning of the animation and then look down here in the lower left hand side of the timeline.
There are three icons. The first one of which is Selected. This is actually referencing at the switch is colon. This is what we gone through just here, if we go ahead and turn off the switch is colon. They disappear and we have now got the entire timeline to play with. However, let us turn that back on because I do suggest you keep it on all times. It is one of the most useful panels but the one next to it is the “modes panel”.
If you go ahead and click that, this activated the layer blending modes and the “Track Mat options”, and these are things that will go very much more detail later on. And I wanted to show you where that option is if we go ahead and close that. the next across will allow you to activate the “Duration Options”. So, we can actually choose the in point, the out point, the overall duration or a stretch value for any item in the timeline.
So, we cannot simply speed up and slow down things or organized where they appear by using anyone of this values. But there are other ways to do many of those options. But this is what these two curly Brackets mean here. They are simply activates the duration panel.
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