Here's a question for you animation gurus. I'm doing an animation of a helicopter climbing from 50 feet to 300 feet to pass over a power line. The helicopters rotor is spinning and everything is working fine. Then I figure out that I probably should have shown the copter flying at 50 feet at the beginning for a second or two more but I couldn't figure out how to add time to the begining of the timeline. Anyone run into this? Is it possible? Thanks

only thing i can think of is to click on the time line for the chopper, bring the tweener to bezier.. and adj the "in" so it's longer.. bu it'll make the end faster. other thing would be to "shift click" all the timeline markers and move them all to the right... anyone else?

I've done that! I haaaaaaate that. The best work-around I've found is to add a new keyframe on the very first frame of all the animated objects. Then slide all of the keyframes forward a couple of seconds except for the new ones. The additional keframes at the front allow for better control when you adjust the animation parameters to fix the weirdness that will occur in the tweener. Make sure that you change the tweener between frame 0 and frame 1 to a discreet tweener or you'll keep having strange things going on as you adjust things on the keyframes at frame 1. BTW, how'd the Alamo turn out? mark

Thanks for the info. Hey Mark, the Alamo graphic got pushed back when the movie's premiere got changed. We also changed the focus of the graphic so I won't be doing the detailed version that I posted here a few months ago. Instead, we're showing the original Alamo compound's footprint in relation to present day San Antonio.

from a different/editing point of view...is it going to be one long shot? why not just do a 'save as' and redo the timeline...(render) have your copter do its hover for 1 - 3 seconds..then render your other file..then just edit them together?