keyframe craziness

[sb4]

Bizarre stuff keeps happening as I try to learn how to make an action with my flour sack (chapter 4 AM A Complete Guide).

 

I made an action with the flour sack "hopping" which looks fairly OK when I play it.

 

However, somehow the keyframes are "lost" to the toolbar -- pressing next or previous keyframe does nothing. And the action defaults to keyframe "1:00" when I load it -- when I play it, I see the counter jump to 0:00 then play to 1:00 where it stops, as expected. But I can't jump to any of the keyframes

 

Now, I think something changed, because when I built the action, I was jumping from keyframe to keyframe. But I took a side experiment to see what would happen if I set the frame rate of A:M to 5 FPS and rendered an AVI file from a completely different action. When I returned to the first action, I think I saw some fractional frame numbers, which was cool because it indicated they were recorded somehow even though the frame rate had been altered. But those fractional frames disappeared at some point as I continued to experiment-- I'm never sure what's going on, and I restart the program many times to check if the problem is transitory.

 

So I returned to frame rate to 24 or 30 (I couldn't remember which I originally chose, but the problem is there with both). I am left with an action that seems to play fine, but I can't find or visit the keyframes.

 

I'm hard pressed to even know what to ask here. I suppose some insights to frame rate might be useful -- for example, is frame rate stored per project, or is it an A:M parameter global to all projects? I would hope it is stored per project at least.

 

-SB