Scene_2.mp4 - Google Drive I've switched from the AE I was using at the beginning of this clip to the CA I used at the end....much prefer the CA!! Now I need to bring 'Lizzy' back in and her wings need to flutter, any ideas how I might best achieve that in CA before I get in there and start noodeling around?
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How are they "at the top'?
No problem! Glad to hear you have it working.
Also, just a thought--if the wings will always be in sync and will always mirror one another, then I don't see any real reason to have them in separate layers like Right and Left. So if you have more problems with syncing in the future, one solution would be if you kept them on the same layer and just cycle through a dual Wings Group.
If you do it this way, it should be impossible to have any syncing problems no matter how hard you'd try, accidentally or not.
Nailed it!! Pawn Shop, Thank you SO much for really spelling it out for me, it's super helpful and quite frankly the only way I ever seem to understand anything! Here's the cartoon you helped me with 
Lair of the Lizard Queen Sizzle Reel - YouTube "Lair of the Lizard Queen" The Best of Quinton Flynn - YouTube Scene_2.mp4 - Google Drive
Dave I LOVE the way the cycles were used on the skeleton character for talking in your latest YouTube! Now I can start experimenting with it. I like how my characters look and perform in CA better than AE and Animate (which i learned a little bit in school but it mostly just confused me.) :}
Nice cartoon! I get a 404 error from your latest link though, unfortunately. So for speed, there are a few possible solutions. The more frames you have in an animation, the slower that animation will be, but the higher your framerate is, the faster all frames will wizz by. Take the example below:
Notice how smooth the 60 FPS (frames per second) animations are compared to 30. This is because it has twice the framerate, which means each frame in the 30 FPS example lasts twice as long as a single frame for 60 FPS.
If you were to set your puppet to a higher framerate, the wings at one frame cycles would automatically become faster because the frames will be quicker. 30 frames is 1/30th of a second per frame, 60 frames is 1/60th of a second per frame. You'll need to plan things out a bit if you intend on bringing this back to AE and putting it into one of your videos (because we should be working with both programs in the same framerate).
There are also animation techniques specifically for speed. I'd recommend looking at page 96 of the Animator's Survival Kit (here's a free pdf version, it's a must-read for any one interested in animation) where it demonstrates the 'Elongated Inbetween' method, which is essentially a one or two frame blur between two extreme poses. It looks like it wouldn't work on still paper until you try it in animation, you'd be surprised at how well it works. That's one possible technique to use for these wings but you also need to consider that, in order to make it faster, you need to shorten the cycle. You'll have to find a point to sacrifice in having inbetweens (assuming you have 6 inbetweens and two extremes, that makes an entire wing flap take 8 frames), frames total, and frames per second (which you change in the Scene before clicking on your puppet).
Definitely look at the e-book, it has almost everything you'd ever need to know about animation.
Wow it works!!!
Thanks again, I appreciate all the time, knowledge and effort you offered up!!
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