Cracking Open The Timeline & Its Secrets

In this lesson we're going to quickly take a look at the actual timeline in Photoshop that makes animation possible. So if this isn't visible in the bottom of your screen or on one of the sides go up to window and then just go to a timeline and then click it and it'll it will open up like this. Now when you first start it it's going to be empty and it'll ask you if you want to create a video or timeline or frame information for everything that we're doing in terms of pixel art you always want to make a frame in animation. So you just click it and it immediately opens the timeline and creates a new frame. I tend to put things at the point one seconds so a tenth of a second as opposed to leaving it with zero delay because it tends to be a bit fast now. You can actually change it to a like a video timeline just by pressing this button down here and then back to frame animation. But like I said for everything we're going to use it's pretty much just always going to be on frame. Narration The next section here will determine how many times the animation actually loops. So you get it. It defaults to once. You could set it to three times forever or other. So if you click other you can say like you know play 10 times but it won't go any higher than that. I usually set mine to forever and that's because more often than not the animations that I'm creating are actually looping animations and I don't really want them to ever stop over here if you go to the far right. You have this fly out menu and you can actually create a new frame copy frame paste frames optimize the animation which will kind of do exactly what it says it'll try to you know make the animation as small as possible in terms of the actual file size and size itself. And you know create new layer for each new frame so that's saying if you want to create essentially an animation as you go. Like if you for example had that option. Selected you for example made a new frame. It just added a new layer in it named it frame 2 and then it'll continue to do that. OK. So that's one option that you can have on the other is new layers visible in all frames. So that means that if you create a new layer So say for example if we make a new layer and we're on frame 5 and I draw this in it's going to be visible on all of them whereas if that's unchecked and say we get to frame 6 or well now 7 and we create this it's only visible in frame 7. OK. So that's just something to be aware of. You can again convert it to a video timeline in this panel. You can also go to panel options and make it larger so you can see more of what's going on. And there are also other options. So you can tweak things. So for example if in this frame this little guy let's make it an actual like Square. So we wanted to start off the frame out of frame. Create a new frame here and then we want it all the way at the end. If you select these two and hit this little sequential dot icon this will open the tween window and you can actually put in the number of frames that you want in between all layers are just a selected layers. And then this will determine if you want to tweak the position the Pasotti and the effects. So toggling these will determine what actually gets tweezed so you can then just you know we'll put it to four. And when we only want the selection will click OK. And then if we run this animation and I just hit spacebar you can see that it actually goes across the screen. And it's probably easier if I actually get rid of all of these and then say get rid of frames you just hit the trash can. That's probably a little bit better. Now the other thing you can do is reverse it. Now maybe this animation that I put together previously is a little easier to see. So that little square is kind of like scurrying across if I select these and then go up to referrers frames and then play it by hitting spacebar. Now it goes in the opposite direction so it just took all the frames and it just reverse the order. It's pretty simple. You also undo it. So just like you you can any other change. Right. And then of course you know you can make animations as long as you want. This one's a little bit longer and it just is something that illustrates you can actually set the frames to be different lengths. So see one tenth of a second two tenths of a second one tenth one tenth one tenth. This is half a second here half the second half of second half a second. So you can actually set your frames to be different different lengths as well. OK. So this is just kind of a quick overview. Hopefully if you've been using this before hopefully you've found something that's kind of a new trick that you can add to your current bag of tricks. So in the next lesson we'll take a look at actually animating our icon and getting the Glos that we made previously look like a flashing glow. So see in the next lesson.