How to time link layers to each other

Support Animation related help
1

I am writing a visual story (actually a presentation) and found Synfig as the best tool for what I want to accomplish :smiley: (after evaluating Prezi extensively and also Powtoon and others). Powerpoint is just so last season and ineffective for great presentations.

However, I am worried that one aspect will hinder my progress or at least make my story inflexible if I want to add new parts to it.

Currently I have found the “time swap” feature for layers indispensable to enable making entities visible when I want them to ‘enter’ my storyline, but, is there a way to link these to previous events, rather than a specific time?

E.g. I have a sequence of images that appear one after the other, but currently, if I later want to add another one somewhere in the front or middle, I will have to edit the time of ALL the following layers to enter at a new time.

Can’t I somehow lock the enter time to the enter time of a previous layer? This way I can easily add an image and only need to edit the following layer to reference the new layer instead of the previous one.

Thanks!

2

Use Keyframes. With keyframes you can shift forward or backward (without overlapping) a section of the animation.
Alternatively group the layers to be shifted and modify the Offset parameter, then insert the other layers in the opened time.
-G

3

Ok thanks, that makes sense. I’ll try that.

Regards

4

Ok but I have just realised on other thing:

My keyframes dictate the positions of my entities throughout the animations, while their ‘amount’ value (time swap) dictates when they will appear (and hopefully I will find out in another thread how to make them disappear again), so I assume that if I use your method and move a few keyframes, the ‘amount’ values will not be altered, meaning that the appearing of entities will then be out of sync with their animations.

Not so?

5

I don’t understand. Can you elaborate the problem more detailed?
-G