Animated Strip Time

Here’s one more trick we can do with the NLA: control time itself! By animating one simple value, we can control how time is evaluated for an action strip, allowing us to simulate slow motion or a time lapse, or even to rewind time and make the action go in reverse.

How does it work? Imagine yourself playing with your animation by scrubbing back and forth, making Rain do a little dance as you move the mouse side to side. The result would be a kind of animation in its own right. Essentially, you’d be animating the current frame number, and that’s almost exactly what we’re about to do in this section.

The Strip Time property

I know what you’re thinking: can’t we already control time? Just smear around some keyframes until everything moves as quickly or slowly as we want. Isn’t that what animation is?

Not anymore! Editing keyframes this way is destructive and sloppy, and besides, we’re in the Nonlinear...