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Selecting, Moving, and Deleting Keyframes
The placement of keyframes greatly affects the style of the animation. Using the graph, you can select keyframes and move them up or down to change their value or move them left and right to change the timing. Keyframes can be copied and pasted between splines and parameters.
— Click directly on a keyframe on the spline, or drag a bounding box around the keyframe.
— Drag a bounding box that encompasses multiple keyframes to select more than one.
— To add or remove a keyframe from the current selection, hold down the Command key while selecting the keyframes. This will remove currently selected keyframes and add currently unselected keyframes.
— Press Command-A or right-click in the graph area and choose Select Points > Select All from the contextual menu to select all keyframes from the active splines.
Moving Keyframes
You can freely move keyframes with the mouse, keyboard, or the edit point controls. Keyframes can even pass over existing points as you move them. For instance, if a keyframe exists on frame 5 and frame 10, the keyframe at frame 5 can be repositioned to frame 15.
— Drag the selected keyframe to its new position in the graph. If more than one keyframe is selected, all selected keyframes will be moved simultaneously.
— Hold down the Option key before dragging the keyframe to constrain its motion to a single axis.
— The Up and Down Arrow keys will adjust the value of the keyframes by a small amount.
— The current scale of the graph determines the degree of vertical movement applied to the value with each key press. The closer the zoom in the spline, the finer the adjustment.
— Hold down the Shift key while pressing the Up or Down Arrow keys to increase the value adjustment in larger increments.
— The Value and Time Editors are found on the far right of the toolbar. These number fields allow explicit values to be entered for selected keyframes. These controls are explained in more depth later in this chapter.
— Select one or more keyframes and press the Delete or Backspace key on the keyboard. This only removes the keyframes; it does not remove the spline, even if there are no keyframes on the spline. To remove the spline, right-click over the parameter in the Inspector and choose Remove [parameter name].