The director says "same action, faster." Nothing about the poses is wrong — the timing is. This note is one of the most common in production, and Maya gives you several ways to act on it, each right for a different situation and each with a way to quietly damage the shot.
Scaling everything: the whole shot faster or slower
For a uniform change — the entire performance at three-quarters speed — select every animated control, open the Graph Editor, select all keys, and scale them in time around a pivot frame. The pivot matters: scale around frame 1 and the shot stays anchored at its start; scale around the middle and both ends move.
Two things to check before calling it done:
- Fractional keys. Scaling by anything other than a clean ratio lands keys between frames. It plays back fine, but stepped-preview workflows and some exporters dislike it — snap keys to whole frames afterwards and confirm nothing doubled up.
- Contacts drift. Feet that were planted on exact frames may now plant on halves. Check every contact after a scale; this is where retiming visibly breaks a shot.
The habit that saves the day when the note gets reversed: keep a copy of the original timing — duplicate the scene or the animation layer first. "Actually, the old timing was better" is a very real follow-up note.
Retiming a section without touching the rest
Usually the note is narrower: the anticipation is fine, the hit should be faster. Scaling everything would wreck what already works, so the move is local:
- In the Graph Editor, box-select only the keys of the section, across every control involved.
- Scale them toward the section's start frame.
- The gap this opens (or the overlap it creates) against the following section is your new problem — slide the downstream keys as a block to close it.
That third step is the one people forget, and the symptom is a hold that appears from nowhere or two actions colliding. The rhythm of reading these problems in the curves is covered in Graph Editor tips — steep means fast, flat means hold.
Retiming while blocking is much cheaper than retiming spline: in stepped mode, timing changes are pure and nothing interpolates strangely in between. Get the rhythm right before converting; it is the cheapest timing pass you will ever do.
Offsetting: the retime that creates overlap
The third kind of retime moves nothing faster or slower — it moves things apart. A character whose head, chest and hips all hit a pose on the same frame reads mechanical; slide the head's keys two frames later and the chest's one, and the same poses read alive. Animators call it overlap, and the operation is just offsetting whole curves in time per control.
Doing this by hand in the Graph Editor works but gets tedious across many controls — select one control's curves, shift them, select the next, shift slightly less, and so on down a chain. This is exactly the job AnimKit's Sync tab automates: Time Offset shifts a control's keys per-key or only after the current frame, Time Scale compresses or stretches a selected range or the whole timeline, and Stagger applies a cascading offset down a selection chain in one action — the tail-follows-body effect without the per-control ritual. Everything operates on your actual selection, so the scope of the retime is whatever you have selected and nothing more.
Where a plugin does not help: deciding how much. Offset by feel, scrub, adjust. The tool removes the clicking, not the judgement.
After any retime: a cleanup pass
Retiming leaves debris — keys that landed on the same frame twice, fractional keys, redundant keys that no longer change anything. A quick cleanup keeps the curves editable for the next note; the specifics are in cleaning animation curves in Maya.
Frequently asked questions
How do I speed up an entire animation in Maya? Select all animated controls, select all keys in the Graph Editor, and scale them in time around a pivot frame — then snap keys back to whole frames and re-check foot contacts.
How do I slow down just one part of a shot? Box-select only that section's keys across the involved controls, scale away from the section start, then slide everything downstream as a block to close the gap you created.
Why do my keys end up on half frames after scaling? Non-integer scale ratios place keys between frames. Snap them to whole frames afterwards, and check that two keys did not land on the same frame in the process.
What is the difference between scaling and offsetting keys? Scaling changes how fast something happens; offsetting changes when it starts. Overlap — the natural look of parts arriving at slightly different times — is offsetting, not scaling.
The bottom line
Match the operation to the note: scale everything for "faster overall", scale a section and close the gap for "this part faster", offset per control for "it feels mechanical". Keep the original timing somewhere until the note is approved, snap to whole frames, and re-check contacts. When the offsets and staggers get repetitive, that is the job AnimKit's Sync tools were built for — and the wider landscape of timing tools is in best Maya animation plugins.
