Keying modes
Auto Key and its channel list, keying by hand, and the three modifiers that change what a key does: Relative Keyframing, Auto-Freeze and Keyframe Interval.
There are two ways a keyframe gets written: Auto Key records the change you just made, or you press Add Keyframe and record the current state on purpose. Three settings sit on top of that and change what the write actually does: two of the small toggles beside the channel popups, and a combo.
All of them live in the Timeline header. All of them work in Animate mode only.
Auto Key
Auto Key is the split button near the left of the header. Its main half arms recording and turns red while it is on; it starts off. With it on, moving, rotating or scaling a layer writes a keyframe at the current frame without you asking.
It only records the channels it is armed for. Click the caret beside the button to open Auto-Key Channels and tick what you want recorded.
The popup is a four-column grid of twenty-nine channels, grouped by family. It covers every keyframable sub-track in the app, the layer-effect parameters and the bone channels included.
| Group | Channels | Records |
|---|---|---|
| Transform | Position, Rotation, Rotation X, Rotation Y, Scale, Anchor, Follow Path | Moving, rotating, tilting and scaling the layer, moving its pivot, and travel along a path |
| Shape | Vertices, Fill, Stroke, Expose, Dash, Mesh | Re-shaping the path, each style parameter on its own, and mesh deformation |
| Appearance | Opacity, Blend Radius, Layer Effects | Layer opacity, a group's blend radius, and effect parameters |
| Camera | Camera Depth, Zoom, Point of Interest, Depth of Field | The camera-only rows |
| Layer | Switch, Z-Order | Which variant shows, and the draw-order hop |
| Bone | Angle, Stretch, Position, Inverse Kinematics, Angle Dynamics, Position Dynamics, Scale Dynamics | Every bone channel and parameter group, one tick each |
Nine start off: Vertices, Fill, Stroke, Expose, Dash, Anchor, Opacity, Blend Radius and Layer Effects. Everything else is armed out of the box.
Three icon buttons sit in the popup title row and act on the whole grid at once: All ticks every channel, None clears them, and Invert flips each one. They are actions rather than a mode, so none of them ever looks selected.
Keying by hand
The diamond button between the two keyframe-navigation arrows writes keyframes at the current frame for every selected layer, in one undo step. It has its own channel popup, independent of the Auto Key one, with the same three All / None / Invert actions.
On a bone layer it keys the selected bone rather than the layer: a position keyframe on a static bone, an angle keyframe otherwise. It does nothing while the playhead is on frame 0.
Relative Keyframing
The third of the four small toggles. With it armed, editing a channel that already has keyframes does not create a new one: instead the difference between what you set and what the frame was showing is added to every existing keyframe on that channel. The whole motion shifts, and the timing is untouched.
This is how you raise a walk cycle by ten pixels without flattening it, or rotate a whole rig a few degrees after the animation is blocked. It applies to the layer channels and to style, effect and bone parameters alike.
Two cases fall back to a normal keyframe: a channel with no keyframes yet, and a value that cannot be offset, a fill style, an on/off switch or a whole-number parameter.
Auto-Freeze
The fourth toggle. Before writing a keyframe at the current frame, it inserts a second one on the frame before, holding whatever the animation was showing there. The change you just made cannot bleed backwards into the pose you already liked.
The frozen keyframe copies its easing and interval from the keyframe that governs it, so the earlier part of the motion keeps its shape.
Auto-Freeze stands down when there is nowhere to put the freeze: on frames 0 and 1, when the previous frame is already keyed, and when the channel has no earlier keyframe at all.
Keyframe Interval: animating on twos
The narrow combo beside the Easing combo sets the interval of the selected keyframes, from 1 to 8. At 1, the default, the channel interpolates every frame. At 2 it samples the tween every second frame and holds in between, which is the classic look of animating on twos; at 3, on threes, and so on.
The interval belongs to the keyframe, not to the layer, so it governs the segment that leaves that keyframe. One channel can run on twos while another runs smoothly, and a single sub-track can step on twos through an action and return to ones for a settle.
Like the Easing combo, Interval is disabled unless a keyframe is explicitly selected. Select a diamond first, then set it.
Choosing between them
- Blocking poses: Auto Key off, key by hand so nothing is recorded by accident.
- Straight-ahead work: Auto Key on, then None and tick Position, Rotation and Scale.
- Fixing a finished motion in bulk: Relative Keyframing.
- Fixing one pose without disturbing the one before it: Auto-Freeze.
- Giving a shot a hand-drawn cadence: Interval 2 on the channels that carry the action.