The Timeline
The Timeline shows the entire length of the movie, from the first frame on the far left to the final one . You can jump to any point in the movie by clicking on the Timeline. To help you navigate around, position your mouse over the Timeline to display a thumbnail image of the movie at that point.
It is marked in either seconds or frame numbers. The timeline units can changed with the help of the Timeline Units option under the View main menu.
The Frame bar
The Frame bar contains a graphical display of each individual frame in the movie, starting with the first frame at the left through to the final frame at the far right. Each frame is shown as a selectable rectangle. Either a single frame or a continuous range can be selected and then modified by an edit operation.
You can regard the framebar as showing a magnified portion of the timeline. Because each frame lasts only a short period of time (1/25th second by default) the Frame bar will typically only show a small portion of your movie.
Clicking on the Timeline selects a point in time and the frame at that point. The Frame bar will automatically scroll to show the selected frame, which is displayed in red.
For more help on selecting frames using the Frame bar see Selecting frames.
For more help with frames see About frames.
More about the frame bar
Shown below is a portion of a Frame bar and Timeline. The Timeline is marked in seconds.
The frame bar is drawn in 3 strips, to show the objects (like textboxes, images and sounds), the mouse clicks and keys pressed in a particular frame.
How to show or hide the Frame bar and Timeline:
On the Player menu bar select View.
Check or uncheck the menu items for Timeline and Frame bar to show or hide those items.
Viewing edit events and objects
The upper section of the Framebar shows any objects within that frame. Apart from a space, which indicates that there are no events, it can contain one of these images:
|
|
A text box appears in this frame. For more help on text boxes see About Text boxes. | |
|
|
A text box disappears in this frame. | |
|
|
An image appears in this frame. For more help on images see Adding Images. | |
|
|
An image disappears in this frame. | |
|
|
A sound is played in this frame. For more help on sounds see Adding sounds to movies. | |
|
|
Indicates that there have been many changes drawn in that frame. | |
|
|
Indicates that a marker has been added to that frame. For more help on markers see Using Markers |
Viewing mouse activity
The middle slice of the frame bar shows mouse activity.
If the frames in this bar are coloured blue, this means that the mouse cursor is hidden in these frames. For more on hiding the mouse, see Hiding the mouse cursor.
The position of the dot is an indicator of where the mouse pointer is in the frame. The colour of the dot indicates whether it was moved or clicked:
|
|
Gray |
The mouse was not moved. |
|
|
Black |
The mouse was moved. |
|
|
Red |
The mouse was clicked. |
Viewing key presses
See the help topic Viewing key presses for more information on this feature.