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286 Chapter 12: Animation
You can use these t ime display formats:
Fr ames—Displays time in whole frames.
This is the default display mode. The amount of
time covered by a single frame depends on your
choice for the current frame rate. For example,
in NTSC video each frame represents 1/30th of a
second.
SMPTE—Displays time using the Society of Motion
Picture and Television Engineers format.
This is the standard time-display format for most
professional animation work. From left to right,
the SMPTE format displays minutes, seconds, and
frames, delineated by colons. For example, 2:16:14
represents 2 minutes, 16 seconds, and 14 frames.
FRAME:T ICKS—Displays time using frames and the
program’s internal time increment, called "ticks."
There are 4,800 t icks per second, so you can
actually access time intervals as small as 1/4800
of a second.
MM:SS:T ICKS—Displays time in minutes (MM),
seconds (SS), and ticks, delineated by colons.
For example, 2:16:2240 represents 2 minutes, 16
seconds, and 2,240 ticks.
Setting T ime S egments
Theactivetimesegmentspecifiesablockof
working time. You might think of it as a window
in time that you use to focus on a specific part of
your animation.
Specifying an Active Time Segment
Youspecifytheactivetimesegmentbysettingthe
StartTimeandEndTimeforthesegmentonthe
Time Configuration dialog (page 3–725).
You can change the active time segment whenever
you w ant without affecting t he keys you’ve already
created. For example, if you have keys scattered
over a r ange of 1000 frames, you can narrow
your active time segment to work only on frames
150-300.
Changingtheactivetimesegmenthasthe
following effect:
• Restr ic ts the range of time you can access using
the time slider (page 3–701).
• Restricts the range of time displayed when
using the animation playback buttons.
Thedefaultsettingfortheactivetimesegment
runs f rom f rames 0 to 100, but you can set it to
any r ange.
You can also increase the active time seg ment
using the track bar (page 3–703).
Rescaling the Active Time Segment
You use the Re-scale Time button on the Time
Configuration dialog (page 3–725) to change your
entireanimationbasedontheactivetimesegment.
UseRe-scaleTimeasfollows: