The other day when I was thinking on the bounce ball challenge I thought I can do a huge bounce ball… yes huge, extremly high. I wanted the ball to bounce form the ground level to the stars level so I prepared a gradient (linear) from clear cyan to dark blue (black). (Later will scatter some stars there, cluds, etc. to make it funny)
I said: “nice, it is time to use the camera widget”. But then I realized that the camera widget is valid for layouts (backgrounds)with the same aspect ratio of the viewport. But in this case, the dimensions of the background of the huge bounce ball are basically L pixel width by 100*L pixels high (aspec ratio 1:100). But my final output render will be a 16:9 aspect ratio, as usual.
Working with extreme large backgrounds is really a pain in Synfig.
Apart of add a real camera system, do you have other nice idea to deal with that?
I guess I did something similar for my stickfigure animation. I basically create a very wide scene (canvas), something like 1920x300. I took care to also increase the size in units by the same amount. I then created my animation there. I finally imported the wide canvas into the camera canvas, with size 480x270. Both canvases had the same pixel ratio, so the only problem was that most of the scene fell outside the smaller camera canvas. This meant that correctly placing the camera’s took a couple of steps and some nudging, moving the camera while looking through it.
Does that help, or is your problem somewhere else?
And yes, I would be happy with both native camera support in synfig and the ability to see outside the canvas…