So if I turn off the Step Effector here and adjust the Time attribute, you'll see that as I get here to Frame 30, it's the exact same thing as Frame 30 in my original animation. When Fixed mode is used, the playback time for each clone directly relates to the Time attribute. One of the most powerful ways that you can use effectors to control the animation is by switching the animation mode into Fixed.
You might have used this before in the Step Effector to simply offset the animation incrementally among the clones so that each clone starts a few frames after the clone before it. Now, of course, in addition to the Time Offset attribute here in the Cloner object, you have a time offset in most of the effectors as well. Of course, we can adjust this time offset back down to zero so that it starts at the very beginning of the animation. Now, if we play this back, what we're going to see is that it's going to start at Frame 30, it's going to complete the animation entirely, and start it over again. One solution to that and also to get looping is to switch the animation mode from Play to Loop. Now, the one trick with this is it doesn't actually complete the playback of that animation, because it hits the end of the perceived animation before it actually finishes. We can set the time to something like 30 frames, and it's going to wait until Frame 30 to begin the playback of that animation. You can offset this animation if you want. By default, the animation mode is Play, which means it's simply going to play back the animation and it's going to play it back once. So now we have that jack-in-the-box animation happening on all five clones. So here I have a simple jack-in-the-box animation that I've created, and I've cloned that five times. But this is a very powerful attribute that allows you to control how keyframed animation on your objects is going to be transferred onto the clones. I bet a lot of you didn't even know it was there, because we tend to jump straight from the Object tab to Effectors, and skip over this tab entirely.
Tucked away on the Transform tab of MoGraph's Cloner object is the Animation Mode attribute.