Originally published on my old Charteris blog
Whilst trying to debug some fairly complex 3D animations recently I happened upon the SpeedRatio property. It is a property of the Timeline class and therefore all the classes that inherit from it such as Storyboard .
Basically this property allows you to put your animations into slow motion; the value must be from 0 to 1.0 with 0.5 being half speed. Now you could achieve a similar thing with the Duration property and doubling the duration but what you will often find with more involved animations is those children Storyboards and Animations will have there own BeginTime and Duration . With these values being explicitly set, setting the Duration at a higher level will give unpredictable results.
SpeedRatio on the other hand is unlikely to be used in child timelines so can be set, with confidence, on the top most timeline.
I found the technique really useful whilst looking at animations that at full speed just looked wrong. Once slowed I could easily see what the problem was.