How is this going? I’ve disabled window decoration (including close/minimize buttons) for Synfig on this machine due to small screen and can currently not close the preview window… Had to re-enable decorations.
Otherwise I really like the functionality of the preview-window in 0.63.04! Especially that playback automatically goes back to fr.1 when at last frame when invoked. A nice little time-saver that ironed out one workflow speed bump.
May I suggest you move current frame display to bottom row, next to all buttons? Perhaps lower right corner.
When watching your previews you’re watching middle sceen, then pressing buttons or dragging timeline you move your eyes below middle, then switching focus up to middle screen again watching your animation. Then you switch between the two navigating and watching your animation. - Now, at what frame was that motion? You have to switch focus to a third point, above your animation. Since it takes a little while to find focus when switching this is another of those small speed bumps that can be ironed out.
Is it possible to show a continuous tooltip on the time slider? This would be very handy to have some feedback of the frame you are exactly onto the time slider.
-G
It was fixed in my local branch, and I will push it to my github repo asap. and ask Genete if possible to merge into 0.63.04 final release. before that, you can use [Alt]-F4 as a workaround.
Before your comments above, I didn’t realize it is so important in animation production workflow, so I planned to implement it next release:) But anyway, Now it is ready.
I’m glad to hear that you like my tiny job on preview window thank you.
And there is still an annoying bug I can’t manage to fix in this release circle.
I think it is a reasonable request, I have an idea is to merge current frame display, rendered frame and timeline, pls ref to my initial design. And based on your input, there is a room to improve the design, especial for current time display widget. The implementation is still far away from the design at the moment, but I wish I can finalize preview window improvement according to the design in next release.
readout frame numbering moved to status bar near by the last rendered frame widget,
dark background (customizable ) to let artists focus on their artwork content instead of ui widget,
when switch between different zoom levels, the scrolledbar/s (if available) will be set to center position automatically. that means your artwork will zoom in / out from the center of canvas.
non-visible change
now artists can preview those frame/s which are outside of canvas time.
You can have a Preview Window open for each canvas in your animation. So I’m wondering if the title bar of the Preview Window should tell you which canvas is being shown in the Preview Window - so you can tell which Preview Window is which?
I know this is probably outside of your current preview window work but one thing I think might be useful is timeline in/out points for preview.
You quickly set the start and end points for the portion you want to see and hit preview (or rerender if already in preview window).
In point can be set by ctrl-clicking timebar and out point by ctrl-right-click.
This will spare you the step of checking the frame numbers and enter them manually in the render dialog.
(You still can manually enter frame number in render dialog if you prefer.)
I was going to ask for a bit faster previews by skipping the render dialog when rerender (from 2 clicks to one) but I can see that it is useful sometimes to have the dialog so I’m not sure.
Another thing that might be useful but also may be just cluttering the interface with another option is the ability to rerender just a small portion but keep the already rendered frames.
Say your animation is 100 frames and quite heavy, taking minutes to preview render. You do a very small change at fr.50. Then you can rerender fr.45-53 but still see the whole animation of 100fr in the preview window, with the rerendered bit incorporated.
The old frames would probably need to be marked as not rendered, red border perhaps, indicating that they may not be accurate. interpolations might be stretched out to old non re-rendered frames so the preview is not what is actually in canvas.
Thanks rylleman for this nice inputs, “get rid of render option window” is one of things when I met the preview for the first time, you can take a look at the mockup of preview window ui redesign in Feature Discussions sub-forum The second one is really interesting me as well.
I will try my best to implement some of them, but since I am a newbie, all these will happen slowly, piece by piece
I have one question regarding to the “Fit” in zoom widget entry: Should we make it translatable (for localization propose)?
My ideal here is just to make it translatable, and even in non-english environment, if user keyin “fit” or “Fit” or “FIT”, and then hit enter key, the string will automatically change to the localized word of “fit”. It will help speed up zoom level switching in some cases, and the app will be more user friendly I think.
And of cause, if there is a shortcut without modifier key ( “0” to switch zoom level to “Fit”, for example) available. advanced users will gain more time on their animation creation job and they will enjoy spending more and more time on previewing only (I mean wasting time )
Now “fit” is translatable, in a non-english env, user can also type “fit”, the zoom level will switch to fit, and the word in zoom widget will be converted to translated string.
Accelerated keys without modifier are implemented as well.
I’m not sure about that one. I can see your intention, to get less distraction from surrounding objects but I think the border itself can be a distraction in some cases.
On my tablet pc I have a very small screen, I’ve got rid of window decoration for Synfig to get more space. Having a fixed border then would take away too much of my available area.
You are right. I will revert this change untill the code is smart to detecte the size of the monitor in the feature.
I think no only for the users who have a small size monitor, but also those who have big size monitor would prefer displaying more artwork content, for the monitor usage of UI widgets, the less the better And for the next release I prepared a nice improvement for preview window (I hope my code can be ready to push into master before the code freezing for the coming release).
This feature is for experienced user:
hope it can improve your synfig experiencement on a small size monitor.
thank you.
Looks good!
