6.7 Using a timeline

Hollywood Designer allows the creation of projects that use a global timeline. This feature is useful if you want to synchronize your project and music, for example.

To set up a timeline, you need to take these steps:

1. Choose a page that should act as the starting point of your timeline. This is usually the page that starts playing the music, etc. After you have chosen the starting page for the timeline, open the Page delay dialog and select the checkbox "Start timeline on this page", and click "OK". Now you have set a starting page for the timeline. This means that when this page is shown, the timeline position will be reset to 0.

2. Now you need to add multiple pages to your timeline. Simply create your desired number of pages, open the Page delay dialog again, and enter the appropriate timestamp in milliseconds for every new page.

3. All pages that are part of the timeline need to execute the Wait event action event at the end of the page. Otherwise Designer will immediately skip to the next page. So make sure that you add a Wait event action event whenever you want your project to wait for the next timeline position to trigger.

4. Basically, this is already everything that needs to be done. However, you might want to open the Project properties dialog and enable the option called "Preload all pages on startup", because, when using a timeline, it is of critical importance that all pages appear at exactly the right time. However, if your pages use lots of external files like brushes, anims, etc., it could happen that Hollywood Designer is not able to show the pages at the right time because it is still busy loading the data from disk. If you select the "Preload all pages on startup" option, however, all data is loaded before the project is started, so that it is available immediately and no synchronization problems should occur. The disadvantage of the preload feature is that it consumes more memory and takes longer to load. If you can't use the preload option because your project is too large, you could set the page timestamps a bit earlier than necessary and use the Wait timeline action event then.