I’m wondering if anyone else has encountered this. I was trying to learn the shortcut key today to play back animations and found that it’s SHIFT + ENTER, but upon trying to use it I found it worked inconsistently. Sometimes it started the animation, sometimes it stopped it, but never reliably like you’d expect a hotkey to operate. Then after playing around with it some more I found that I COULD get it to behave consistently but only if I pressed and HELD DOWN the shift key before pushing the ENTER button. If I did a quicker tap the action wasn’t reliably triggered.
Is this the expected behavior? Is my keyboard just getting old and busted?
Yeah, that’s why I was posting here to see if anyone else had similar surprising behavior when attempting to use this hotkey combination. The right shift and enter keys are so close together that it’s very easy to tap the shift button and immediately follow up with the enter key to create a quick tap sequence that does indeed overlap and thus SHOULD cause the animation to start playing, but in actual practice it doesn’t work that way. You have to press and hold down the shift key a lot longer than you might think in order for the second step enter key to register and have the playback control take effect. Try it out if you haven’t, -it’s entirely possible that other people might not think this is even an issue at all, but I thought it was a bug at first or at minimum a potential area for improvement.
I have to revise my comment further, -there’s truly something wonky going on with this shortcut combination. I had tabbed back to Harmony just now and hit the playback shortcut combination again and repeatedly could not get playback to initiate, even when holding down the shift key and hitting the enter key multiple times. Eventually the action began and then the hotkey became more functional and responsive, but this is something that seriously doesn’t function consistently.
I also find it so finicky and can’t understand how the devs have lived with it for so long. It really needs to be fixed.
Here’s what I wrote in another post. It’s not a tip, just my findings.
When bound to a keyboard, I have to hit the key as as fast as possible to activate Play. A fraction too slow and it will not work.
Binding it to the Cintiq Expresskeys, I find that if I hit it too fast or too slow, and it will not play. You have to hit it with the perfect timing.
Binding the key to my ShuttleXpress, it is working FLAWLESSLY when I set the drivers to press “once only” as oppose to “hold”. I guess the drivers are using the exact timing needed by sheer coincidence. When set to “hold” it operates like the Cintiq, where you have to time it just right.
Edit: I’ve also tried binding it to a single key, like F12 or F11. It performs a bit better, but not by much.
YES! The keyboard shortcut us inconsistent and DOES NOT work all the time. I have struggled to figure out some rhyme or reason to it. And I have problems with it on my own laptop and on all the computers in the lab I teach in. VERY FRUSTRATING!
Keyboard shortcuts often depend on where the focus of the mouse (or pen pointer)
is. Often for animators using pen and tablet instead of the mouse it can help to check
the feature “Focus on Mouse Enter” on the General Tab of the software preferences.
Yeah… for real. I’ve found that I’ve had to hold down the keyboard shortcut for half a second in order for it to actually play. A fast press just makes the timeline advance a short amount then stop.
It’s… lame. Do the devs like it this way because tapping it lightly makes it advance just slightly but doesn’t actually play it? That’s wack if that’s the case because there are other keys that can advance the timeline.
I’m searching for an advanced option to tick for… having the play keyboard shortcut button just play the thing.
You have to sort of initiate the shortcut before it will work. Hold the Shift key 6-8 seconds (didn’t use a stopwatch or clock…just counted “one-one thousand, two-one thousand,” etc.) then press the Return key while continuing to hold Shift. Once it begins, it works when called upon. However, it sort of goes back to sleep after a few seconds on non-use. So you have to re-initiate it holding Shift for 6-8 seconds.
Pressing the Enter key does not work interchangeably with Return even though many applications use them interchangeably.
I am on a Mac. Not sure how PC keyboards are labeled but the Return key I am referring to is on the right side of the letters and just above the Shift key. The Enter key is at the lower right of the numbers on a full keyboard.
Still WONKY but it isn’t as random as it first seems.