A couple of animation setup questions dealing with re-timing. I guess I feel like I've missed some type of block move capability on animation key-frames. 1. When re-timing an animation sequence, it appears that each individual actor in a scene must be changed one by one. Is there some way to select everything to stretch or compress the length of an entire sequence all at once? 2. Is there an easy method of adding frames to the beginning of a sequence? Or some method of importing one sequence into the middle of another?

1. No, but there's a harder way. You can retime it yourself by grabbing keyframes in the Animation Pallette and moving them to the desired frame. By colapsing the trees, its easy to select all the characters/props/cameras/etc at once, but you have to change each keyframe one-by-one.

2. Yes...sorta...one character at a time. Save your animation as a pose, start a new scene or open an existing one with the same character. Jog your scrubber on your Animation Controller to the desired frame and load your pose. An animated pose will "write over" the proceeding frames for as many frames exist in the pose.

Confused Yet? Hope this helps.

Nutz. Those were the answers I was afraid of hearing. I've got ten multi-character sequences and the client now wants 3 seconds added to the front of each one. Sounds like building & rendering these as separate sequences would be easier than all the accident prone keyframe moving. Just wanted to make sure I was not overlooking some alternative approach. Thanks anyway JK, for confirming my fears.

Well that shouldn't be that hard. Just add 90 frames to your scenes. Open the animation pallette. Collapse everything for easy selecting, drag all your keyframes 90 frames ahead. It's not completely simple but shouldn't cause any problems. Just do a 'save as' first incase of any accidents.

Is there a way to delete all but the last frame? For example, I'd like to do that to begin working on the next part of an animation.

BINGO! That's what I was missing. Somehow I had overlooked the fact that you can select and DRAG a block of key frames. Thanks JK. Doozy - That one I've got. Just go to the last frame and select "Edit/Memorize All" then go to the first frame and select "Edit/Restore All". Now just delete all frames but the first, then re-lenghten the animation back to the number of frames you need. btw doozy, how about an explaination of your moving picture frame post. I'll ask in another thread above.