Differential D8434
UI: Changes to timeline playback popover Authored by Hans Goudey (HooglyBoogly) on Jul 30 2020, 10:19 PM.
Details Here are the issues I see with the current playback popover in the timeline.
In my opinion, the use of headers can fix these problems, making properties faster to find.
Diff Detail
Event TimelineComment Actions Where are the active keying set and new keyframe type placed on? Did you missed them by accident or with intention? Comment Actions They are still in the "Keying" popover. I added an image of that to the description. Comment Actions I think these are nice improvements. Unfortunately the auto-keying changes (although they totally make sense) will mess with muscle memory. People might have a hard time finding them. Adding the Animation module as reviewer. It's a bit annoying that the text in the playback popover is clipped. You could try if UILayout.ui_units_x can be used to increase the width. Comment Actions I will leave the final say on this to the animation team and @Pablo Vazquez (pablovazquez), but from my side this is (almost) fine.
Comment Actions The "After" screenshot now reads "Audio No Sync While Scrubbing" if you just read left-to-right, top-to-bottom. To me a single option "Audio Scrubbing" is easier to understand than "{whitespace} While Scrubbing".
Please don't. It's hard enough to do patch reviews & discuss things when there is a single purpose to a patch. What I miss in the patch description is a motivation as to why these changes are made, what problem they solve, and an explanation as to why this is the best solution for that problem. It also doesn't describe anything about the change in workflow for animators. Please read Ingredients of a Patch. Comment Actions
@Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren) How is "Play While Scrubbing" that gets the point across without repeating the header I will update the description with better motivation and separate the auto keying changes to Comment Actions Audio -- "Scrubbing" please it makes more sense, also when you're looking for the feature you;re looking for "scrubbing" not play while scrubbing. Audio Scrubbing is enough and is common amongst most video/audio players editors Comment Actions Sorry, "Audio Scrubbing" sounds like I'm going to scrub only audio somehow, which would be misleading. "Play While Scrubbing" is slightly long, I agree, but I would also like the name to be descriptive, not just a contraction. @Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren) Comment Actions I dont know man, most softwares use Audio Scrubbing or just Scrubbing under an "audio" menu. Comment Actions Looking much better! Two notes:
(I also sorted them alphabetically, except the top-most item Active Only) Comment Actions I'm with @Luciano Muñoz Sessarego (looch) on this one. I don't feel that enabling "Audio Scrubbing" is suddenly going to disable something else. If that were the case, it should not have been a checkbox, but a two radio buttons that let you exclusively choose "Audio Scrubbing" or "Video Scrubbing". I do have doubts about the "Active Editor Only" option (or "Active Only" as it's called now). Maybe this is not for this patch to fix, because I think it's a decent improvement already. It's just that I can't undestand a situation where you can enable an "X Only" open AND some other options as well. The word "only" means "used to say that no other or others of the same group exist or are there", so enabling that should IMO disable all the other options. Or it should use different wording. Comment Actions I agree wit the notes about audio scrubbing. Both options are easy to understand, and they're even used in other editing software (Premiere calls it Play Audio While Scrubbing, Resolve calls it Audio Scrubbing), so I'd go with the shorter option which is also the one already used in previous versions of Blender (and the manual, books, etc). Good point. Just tested it again and the way that Active Only works now, it should be called just Active because it can be combined with other editors. Having an Active Only would mean that it only updates the current editor, which would be nice but out of the scope of this UI patch. So to proceed:
Comment Actions This is what the popover looks like now:  I'm still not entirely sure about the wording. "Play In Editors: Animation" could just as well be interpreted as "Play Animation in Editors". To me it's not instantly clear that "Play In Editors" means "in which editors will time be moving when pressing the play button". It could also mean "Play what in Editors", so "play animation in editors", "play movie clip in editors". Sure, in the latter explanation many of the options don't make sense any more, but that'll probably just add to the confusion. Comment Actions The context is helpful though. Considering "Animation" is in a list of other editor types, I don't see a problem with it. Do you have a suggestion for different wording? Comment Actions I think Editor should be in the labels for each, and the labels should be consistent with what is in the Editor Type menu for switching editors. Comment Actions
@Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) I agree actually, I was happy to try out the other labels but using these are more Comment Actions Since we're changing naming in the timeline popover i'd change "no sync" to something more explicit, since "no sync" is not the actual point of that feature, the point of it is that it will play every frame, which might be a better name "play every name", "frame dropping", "av-sync" now I still dont know what frame dropping does I understand that "AV sync" will will make sure image and video are in sync at the cost of dropping frames so "frame dropping" doesnt really explicitly tell me what it does, same as with "no sync". So for now the proposal will be only changing "no sync" to "play every frame" Comment Actions +1 for "Play Every Frame". As a general rule of thumb, I always prefer a description that covers what something is, rather than what something isn't. | ||||||||||||||
