| There are a few animation preferences that are essential to set. They affect the way your animation is played back and how you see and work with the timeline. When a scene gets extremely complicated, with many animated surfaces, Maya may not be able to play back every frame of the animation at full speed. This leaves you with two choices: You can either play back at full speed or play every frame. In some cases, you'll want to see the detail in the motion; other times, you'll want to see the overall pace. For a simple scene, however, you can have your cake and eat it, toothat is, you can play back at full speed and see every frame of animation. Maya is used to make animations for films, television, games, and the Internet. Films run at 24 frames per second (fps); television runs at 30 fps; and animation on the Internet often runs at 15 fps. It is important to set the playback speed before you start animating: If you don't, the final animation may be incorrectly paced. To set animation playback speed: 1. | Click the Animation Preferences button  , which is near the lower-right corner of the interface.
The Preferences window opens (Figure 12.22).
Figure 12.22. It is important to set Playback Speed before you start animating. Choosing the wrong playback speed can cause the audio to go out of sync with the animation when it's rendered. 
| 2. | Select Real-time in the pop-up menu next to Playback Speed inside the timeline category.
| 3. | Select Settings from the Categories column.
| 4. | Select your frame rate from the pop-up menu next to Time (Figure 12.23).
Figure 12.23. NTSC (30 fps) is a fairly standard setting for video. 
| 5. | Click Save so that these settings will be recalled the next time you open Maya.
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Key ticks are the red lines that appear on the timeline when you set a keyframe. Set them to appear only for the selected channels if you want to make changes to some attributes and not others in the timeline. To change key ticks options: 1. | Keyframe an object.
| 2. | Click the Animation Preferences button  in the lower-right corner of the interface.
| 3. | In the Preferences window, for Key Ticks select Channel Box.
Any key ticks in the timeline disappear.
| 4. | Select any keyframed channels in the Channel Box.
The key ticks for those channels appear.
| 5. | Open the Preferences window again, change the Key Ticks setting back to Active, and click Save.
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 Tips
Click the Animation Preferences button to access many of Maya's preferences. Once the window is open, try selecting different categories. If the Key Ticks options are set to Channel Box, only the attributes selected will be affected when you edit them. If you keyframe both an object's scale and rotate attributes, you could move the keyframes of the scale alone by selecting those attributes in the Channel Box and moving the key ticks. The rotate keyframes would be left behind.
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