Timeline turns red, layer disappears

[laforge]

Hi guys, I'm new here and hope to get some help for the start with Anime Studio.
You see, I have this character here, and occassinally I run into phenomenon I can't really understand:
http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/3059/captureled.png

I have the guys animations stored in all sorts of Actions. When I do some modifications for an Action (switching the hand to 'closed' etc) sometimes it affects other Actions aswell and the hand gets corrupted, there is no way to bring it back. THe only thing that shows is that small red square, that's all what's left of it.

I'm sure, that's something everyone bumped into, so what is causing this? I really don't have a clue, please help!

Tried to search the forums for this, no luck yet.

[funksmaname]

firstly, just to clarify, you're talking about putting your character in poses, rather than setting up 'actions'? (in AS actions are pre-defined poses or pieces of animation that can be called back into the main timeline - i just wanted to make sure this isn't what you're talking about)

when the timeline is red like that it means the layers visibility is off... go to frame 0 (becuase this is an animatable function, so frame other than 0 will mean the visibility will stay red before the current frame) click the little down arrow next to the name of the layer and tick 'visible'

This will fix the red timeline issue - you might find your hand reappears - otherwise, i'm not sure what happened... the point you see on the canvas is just a selected point (or all the hand points have been squished into a single co-ordinate and are currently selected) - i'm not sure how this could have happened...

nice character btw - good luck, and welcome to the forum

[laforge]

Thank you for your quick reply, yes I too use actions for my poses.

Yes, Visibility was indeed turned off in the whole Switch group for some reason, that solved my problem with the timeline. However, the hand remains lost.
It seems, that you are right about the squishing too, as I can select and delete the square on frame 0.

Can't see the reason for it yet, but I'll post it here if I have a solution. Maybe other experienced it too.

[specialoh]

this is probably well known-obvious just posting because this thread came up when i tried to find my issue

also happens if you have layers with the same name in a switch layer >.< im sure its common knowledge but if you dont know theres nothing to tell you