Animate Mode

Keyframes are the starting and ending points of your animations. They are condensed in your animation timeline as Stacks, represented by grey bars.

If you expand an animation stack in your layers sidebar, you’ll be able to see the individual animations that make up that stack. Each animation is labeled with the property that is being animated, such as position, rotation, or size.

Each animation is made up of keyframes, represented by colorful dots. They always come in pairs, known as a keyframe pair. A keyframe by itself doesn’t mean anything—it’s a static state.

But if you take two different keyframes, that each hold two different values of the same property, they show the transition from the initial value to the second value. This is what creates the animation.

Sometimes an animation will have more than two keyframes if the animation effect transitions through multiple states. But a single keyframe can be in two different keyframe pairs simultaneously. For instance, an animation of a circle traveling to the middle of the canvas and then back to its original place would have three keyframes, but two keyframe pairs. The first keyframe pair might show the circle’s position change from value 0 to value 45 (the circle moves to the middle), while the second keyframe pair shows the change from 45 to 0 (the circle moves back to its original state). The middle keyframe, with value 45, is in two different keyframe pairs simultaneously.

You can move keyframes around by clicking and dragging them, or by moving the snapshots at the top of the timeline.