About Timing

Once you have created a storyboard, you can start working on making your storyboard into a full-featured animatic. The first step to making an animatic is to time each panel and scene in your storyboard to match the intended pace of your action and, if applicable, the soundtrack.

By default, each panel you add to your project is timed to last one second during playback. Hence, you already have a barebone animatic just as soon as you finished creating your storyboard. Using the Timeline view, you can adjust the cue time and length of each panel, then play your animatic to test the pace.

In Storyboard Pro, time is expressed in the following format: HH:MM:SS:FF, where HH means hours, MM means minutes, SS means seconds and FF means frames.

TIP By default, the time at frame 1 of the project is 00:00:00:00. However, in animation, the first frame of a scene is usually identified as frame 1. If you prefer the time at frame 1 of your project to be 00:00:00:01, you can set the time code at the start of your project by changing the Project Start Time setting in the Settings tab of the Project Properties dialog. You can also change the default value of that setting for new projects in the Global UI tab of the Preferences dialog.