Video Editor improvements

I've just started playing with this and while it is really cool, there are a couple of things that annoy me about it:

- When changing a specific keyframe, clicking [Apply] sends you back to the start. (And you have to click the button to save rather than just move onto the next/previous key-frame)

- You can't start the preview from the keyframe you are on; you must [leave] or [apply] before getting to the [preview] button

- When [esc] from the preview it puts your view to the first keyframe rather than where you are on the timeline.

- The timeline bit in each keyframe... it would be useful to see markers on it indicating previous/next. And a way to 'lock' the timestamps of these so that changing the current keyframe's timestamp would only change the spacing of keyframes between the previous locked frame and the next locked frame.

- It would also be really useful to be able to enter a numeric value rather than dragging (20 key-frames, I changed the second key-frame's time stamp from 1sec to 5sec and then had to reduce the last one from 10 mins to 1 min) Similarly if you are trying to drag the FOV, you have to be precise (arrow keys will move view point).

- Although you can go back/forward in the keyframes, you have no idea numerically where in the path you are - it would be useful to show "5/30" in the keyframe editor title and/or the timeline strip (from the video editor dialogue with the current keyframe highlighted.

- Double clicking on another keyframe camera in the viewport should take you to that keyframe rather than zooming to the camera's geometry

- 'save' and 'load' buttons should be within the video editor dialogue rather than as native application buttons.... Similarly the [export] should be a button here too.

I've found that when fine-tuning camera positions, it's handy to reduce the movement speed from the input settings down to the minimum; it would be nice to have a short-cut key or button to temporarily put this to minimum.

It would be nice to set some options on the geometry used for the cameras and lines; size, colour, gap from path, path thickness.

Not that I ever plan to build roller-coasters, but it might be nice to manually add a subtle tilt to the camera when going round corners; adding in a 'yaw' to specific cameras.

I find it strange that Enscape does not save the path automatically when you [leave] the video editor (and that it does not save/load it with the model)

I love the movement of the clouds when you change the time of day, but I would really like to be able to turn things like* 'cloud movement' on during the recording of a video while keeping the same time of day. (* Things like: wind in trees, ripples in grass fields, TV screens, ...)

As has been mentioned elsewhere, it would be nice to be able to drag the video editor dialogue to other parts of the screen (If it's not docked to an edge, the pin would roll it up to just the title bar)

{Edit}

It would be handy if the [preview] took into account the aspect ratio set in the settings and actually showed you how the frames would be cropped.

It also be useful to have an advanced camera position input on-screen with editable access to the x,y,z of the camera positions and target direction (so that you could set every camera to a specific height or tweak the numbers to move rather than physically moving the mouse/cursor)

When saving it would be useful to have a [more...] dialogue with the settings from the capture tab of the main enscape settings.

Other options could be to include an estimate render time and estimate file size with the option to split the video into X segments rather than render it all out into one file.

Would be good to add a tic box to prevent the computer from going into "sleep" when rendering and some options on whether to "render in background" (would take longer, but use limited resources) and/or something to set how much memory to dedicate to the rendering process.

In the keyframe options, there are options to set the FOV (And DOF) per camera, it would be cool to also have an option to set different values for the PaperModel mode, outlines, fog, grass and the light brightness.

The process of changing videos after they have been generated is really tedious and normally it is better to just re-render the whole thing, but with the way Enscape records keyframes it should be possible to do some clever things:

- When generating the video, append the xml with the time stamp and frame number as it renders each specific keyframe. (This will be saved as a separate file or a separate section within the same file)

- If the FPS is increased then Enscape does not need to render frames it has already; it can use the original video file and slot every other frame into it.

- If there are changes to specific keyframes, it can compare them with what has been rendered before and just update the video with the changed frames; splice in the new footage and/or update the existing.

- The same 'loading' splash could be added onto the front of the video for X seconds with a fade into the video.

(Obviously if geometry changes then the videos would not be the same, and a splice could look odd... but a user should know that and this could be a *feature* used to easily generate the movement of geometry in a video.)

Just to mention it again, I would also like to have keyframes and scenes interchangeable.