Timing of animated objects

Hi,

My problem is the following:
I have in my animation about 100 objects. Each of these objects are animated separately (mesh deforming). Now I would like to duplicate these 100 objects 4 times. If I want these duplicated objects to have the same mesh deforming I would like them not to have the same timing.
So my question is : Is it possible to create a kind of group of the 100 first objects then duplicate this group and modify the timing of the group rather than modifying the timing of each object ?
The goal is to modify the timinig only 3 times rather than 300 times.

I hope I am clear enought

thank you for your help

GFP

I guess… you could emparent them to an empty, then create a plane with 100 vertexes. make the empty son of the plane, and then dupliverts… every vertex should contain an ampty and its 100 mesh sons. I haven`t tried yet but I guess it works