Feature request : Add comments to the timeline

Home English Feature request : Add comments to the timeline

PyroJim 2022-04-29 07:15:33
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  • PyroJim
    Joined: Aug 2019
    Posts: 2
    Location: United States
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    I’d like the ability to insert a comment the same way I insert an effect.

     

    This would give me the ability to flag some point in the timeline to:

     

    1) Indicate where I’m doing a song change,

    2) Indicate where I left off editing before I got up and left the computer for the night,

    3) Flag a particular part (or parts) of a timeline that I want to point out to someone that I’m sharing the file with,

    4) Labeling cool sequences so that you can find them later

     

     

    It could just be a little flag just like an effect, but if you touched it with a curser or whatever, it would show your comment.  Or you could have a command “show all comments” or “Hide all comments” .

     

    I’d use this feature a lot.

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    Will
    Joined: Feb 2018
    Posts: 59
    Location: Palo Alto
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    This is a terrific feature suggestion.  It is especially helpful that you’ve listed the four example use cases.   Example 2 implies that these notes need to be easy, lightweight, to create and delete.

     

    We’ve been thinking of generalizing the camera key frames feature to other kinds of key frames, and I think this implementation strategy is a good path for your idea, which I’ll call “timeline notes”.

     

    We recently added “Show > Looping > Set start/end marker” which is in the recent beta release.  This function is built off the camera key frames foundation, as you can see from the screenshot.  The two vertical dotted lines are the looping markers, and they are represented in the camera key frames table.

     

    I will add this feature idea to our future feature list and look for a time to implement it, because it fits naturally with this implementation strategy.  Do you have in mind what the notes should look like on the timeline when not hovered over and then also when hovered over, showing the note?  For example, in the screenshot below, the looping points are blue dotted vertical lines.  Normal camera key frame lines for the camera are yellowish solid vertical lines.  What do you have in mind?

     

    Your suggestion of “show/hide all comments” seems important.  If those functions hide the timeline notes markers, it might also be useful to have a function “Expand/collapse all timeline markers” to show all the notes themselves without requiring you to hover over them with the cursor.

     

    Ulf Werner
    Joined: Nov 2018
    Posts: 38
    Location: Bottrop
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    I like the request of Pyrojim and i also think that Wills suggestion to implement this is an excellent way. Waiting for it.

     

    Just one more input on it. As we actual have the possibility create reports of both windows (camera and script) with the comments feature it could be interesting to create a report with script and commentlines in combination. So sometimes we generate a chronological script and maybe the comment lines could hold additional infos which i want to see in one report script/comment list.

    Will
    Joined: Feb 2018
    Posts: 59
    Location: Palo Alto
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    I hadn’t thought of reports, but yes, we get “timeline notes” reports for free with this implementation, since you can make a report template from any of the table windows including this window.  It is easy to make a template for the camera key frames table window.  The template could filter for the timeline notes, excluding camera keyframes, looping keyframes, and any others.

     

    Creating reports that draw from multiple table windows, combining the keyframes rows with the script rows, is more difficult, since report templates are tied to a specific data set.  I don’t see a good way to do this.  The best I can think of at this time is that you print a chronological script report and then also print a timeline notes report, resulting in two reports.

     

    The next major project we are working on, starting in a couple weeks, is improving reports.  One of the improvements seeks to combine reports together in “books” templates that enable you to print a “book” with a single click that contains a pre-defined set of reports and diagrams within it.  Even this improvement, though, as currently conceived, does not combine table data sets in a single report; it is more like stapling together multiple printed reports one after the other.

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