Hi

Is it possible to annotate the timeline?

I usually animate my camera to follow certain events on screen.
For example, an object appears on to the right and then the camera
zooms in to focus on it or follow it around for a while.

After a little while I end up with many key frames on my timeline.
I can scrub back and forth to remind myself what event triggered
that camera movement but it can be tedious.

If there was a way to annotate the keyframes on the timeline that would
be great.

Regards
El

there are small programs used for meetings etc that you can annotate on your screen with, but it’s not interacting with maya, so as soon as you alter your timeline it wont correspond.

another way though is to use the annotation tool (Create -> Annotation...) , position it/constraint it to the cam and animate the visibility perhaps?

Lee Dunham | Character TD
ldunham.blogspot.com

i had to do this once and what i ended up doing was creating a specific animation curve that wasn’t really connected to anything.
the animators wanted to mark certain keys as a Key Frame, In between, Breakdown, etc… basically from a preset list of options.
I made a simple UI and whenever the animator made a choice and applied to the current key, i would set the value on the animation curve to an integer.
I then created a HUD that would read the current value off that animation curve and display the string if that frame held a keyframe.

The other benefit of storing this data on an animation curve is the animator could see my special curve in the dopesheet and could move the annotations with the other keyframes dirving the character, keeping the annotations in sync with the animation.