Thanks for the vertical timeline suggestions. I knew about it, but for a single screen it still tends to take up a lot of space. I guess I could scale it back to the side to show just the preview images without the timeline or opacity bars.
However there is a few of problems with this setup:
1) I actually like to keep horizontal timeline view as default for when I want to view a large part of the timeline (rather than dragging a vertical timeline back and forth). Can I currently have two different timeline windows?
2) If there is no image on a particular layer, it's on hold or in the middle of an exposure I can't tell from glancing at the previews. It'd be good to have a symbol on the previews to indicate if any of these are the case (without needing to view the timeline part).
3) For just viewing layers, it still wastes space:
4) I still find the preview images a tad small for my preference. A preview view window would allow for larger thumbnails without taking space away from all the other features of the timeline window (Or alternately, could or do we have the option to resize these preview images and timeline images?).
Ideally, I'd just like the option to have a window that shows the layers of the current frame and little else like so:
I don't actually own photoshop, but all the other illustration programs I've seen do the same. A lot of the time in TVP I focus only on a single image, so why not have a viewer that represents that without the bulkiness of a timeline (to match these standards when I'm in an illustratory frame of mind)?
Just a "it might be nice" suggestion, not a dire need (despite the girth of this reply).
