Copying animations

- As you start to use InDesign animations in more of your projects, at some point, you're probably gonna wanna copy, or duplicate, your animations, right? Well, I actually wanna show you how that works, because there's currently a behavior in copying animations that I found to be a little, oh, unexpected, and it requires a little bit of working around. Let me show you what I mean. I've opened the Layers panel here and the Timing panels so that you can see them more clearly. I have these three objects, 1 2 3, and they appear on the Layers panel as you would expect.

I put the number 1 here first, then number 2, and then number 3, so they're listed from the 1 at the bottom up to 3. I'm gonna animate these now, so I'll hold down the Shift key and select them, and then I'm gonna apply the animation Fade In. Now, I want them to animate starting with number 1. So, as you might expect, the Timing panel is the reverse of the Layers panel: 1, 2, 3. But let me show you what happens when I copy and paste these animations.

Before I do that, I'm gonna also go ahead and link numbers 2 and 3, and let's see the order it plays in. 1, and then 2 and 3 come in at the same time. Everything is as expected up until now, so I'll select all of these objects, and command or control copy them into the clipboard, and then I'm gonna go to another page in this file, and just paste them. Take a look at the Timing panel. Notice it's now in reverse. In fact, what's happened is it matches the Layer panel, and indeed, if we play this animation, it's the complete opposite of what we expect.

It turns out copying and pasting animations does two things. One, it removes any linking you have in your animation Timing panel, which is perhaps not that big a deal but the other thing that is a bigger deal is it changes the order of your animations. It basically sits them to match the Layers panel. Let's do another test. I'm gonna delete those and go back to the first page, and in the Layers panel, I'm gonna actually put the number 1 object in between 3 and 2.

So I'm gonna copy these again, and go back to that second page and paste them, and you can see the Timing panel has matched the Layers panel exactly. Imagine what happens with this in a more complex animation. Let's take a look at this line graph, and I'll show you how it animates… The first line comes in, the second line of the graph comes in, and then the third. Now, let's say that I wanna duplicate this page within this file, or maybe drag this entire page into another file.

Well that essentially copies all the objects, and the animations with them. Here's our Timing panel, we know what order things are supposed to play in, and I'm gonna duplicate this page by dragging it over the New Page icon. So we're now on that second page, and let me play the animation for you now. Oh, that is not good. Everything is coming in in the order in the Layers panel, which has nothing to do with the order that I wanna animate it in. So, as far as the work-arounds go, the choices aren't great.

For simple animations, you could either order the Layers panel to be the same as your animation, or simply rearrange the animations in the Timing panel once you've done a copy and paste. But for more complex animations, just be prepared to spend some time re-ordering and re-linking the animated objects in your Timing panel.