Greetings!
Short version:
Can we have a couple tweaks to the timeline, adapted from Animate?
Long version:
I’ve had TBS 7 for about a year now and I’ve felt a lot of frustration with the timeline. I was curious about the winter sale ending tomorrow and investigated the new versions of studio and animate and found that animate does all the simple things it should out-of-the-box. The primary examples of this that I’m interested in are:
- When creating a drawing on frame 1 and a subsequent drawing on frame 5, for example, drawing 1 is automatically exposed thru frame 4, like this:
1—5
This is incredibly useful for blocking out timing from the get-go, and particularly for syncing key poses with audio, such as for dialogue animation.
Studio leaves these frames blank and none of the methods of extending exposure have an overwrite option to prevent shifting of these key drawings. The best option I’ve found for this is to select the empty cells, look at the XSheet for the drawing number I want, then type that number into the cell properties field, repeating for each key, which is tedious at best.
- When inserting an empty drawing on frame 3 to create an in-between, the exposure of frame one automatically fills to frame 2, then, and 3 to 4.
1-3-5
This makes adding breakdowns and in-betweens painless.
However, in Studio, there is no such feature. The closest I can get is to delete the area I want to contain my new drawing and do the same as with #1, continuing the tedium. Of course, since #1 is the source of frustration, this would be rather trivial to do manually by the user without any extra implementation on your end.
- Finally, the auto light table. In Animate, this respects layer visibility and all is well.
This keeps things clean and efficient!
But in Studio only the camera view respects layer visibility. The drawing view shows everything in auto light table mode, no matter what and it can become quite a mess. I hope this would also be an easy switch, too, a matter of adding a conditional to the rendering and to refresh the display when some visibility is toggled.
Is there any hope of having these simple, but important features ported over, at least #1? It’s been my biggest time-sink and is the only thing that prevents me from fully enjoying the software. Working on sequential frames and extending exposure works for basic situations, but causes problems as soon as there’s some kind of timing to be preserved, such as for dialogue sync or other parallel action between layers. I’ve explored every option and workaround I can find and think of, but nothing even approximates the immense utility that this small change in behavior would have.
Thank you very much for your time and for providing a competitively affordable animation solution! I feel it’s superior to the competition in many ways and this is the only real shortcoming I’ve experienced from Studio. I would be incredibly grateful to see Studio get a little bit of love in the frame-by-frame animation department, and I hope it’s an easy adaptation for your hardworking devs!