Timeline is difficult to control or not responding

Symptoms

If one or more of these match what you are seeing, you are on the right page.

• •Keyframes are not visible anywhere in the timeline
• •Scrolling zooms when panning was wanted
• •The playhead disappears during playback
• •There are too many tracks to find the one you need

Causes and fixes

Ordered from most to least likely. Work down the list — each cause is paired with what to do about it.

1. 1

   The view is zoomed to the wrong range.

   Press Ctrl+Alt+F to fit the full project duration, Ctrl+Shift+F to fit the work area, or select keyframes and press F to zoom to them.

2. 2

   Scroll is zooming rather than panning.

   The scroll wheel in the keyframe area zooms, centred on the cursor. Hold Shift to scroll horizontally instead, or drag the scroll bar at the bottom of the keyframe area.

3. 3

   The playhead scrolls out of view during playback.

   Turn on the follow-playhead toggle in the transport bar so the timeline scrolls automatically to keep it visible.

4. 4

   The track list is too long to navigate.

   Use layer search, the track type filters, and the keyframe-only filter to hide tracks that have nothing on them.

5. 5

   Property tracks are collapsed.

   Each element row has an expand arrow revealing one track per animated property. Keyframes are on those sub-tracks, not the element row.

Related pages