Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

I thought instancing had everything to do with coloring a frame and having all instances of that frame colored as a result. After studying the Manual a bit and looking through some of the threads that feature "Instance panel" I'm not sure my presumption was correct.

It seems to be a tool to expedite timing. Am I correct? And if so, does TVPA have a feature for the instancing of coloring frames? I'm a bit in the dark here.

It's main purpose is effectively timing.

If you select several layers (lines + coloring) and drag out an instance, it will be applied to all selected layers.

If what you mean is reusing the same frames elsewhere in the layer/project, no it doesn't do that.

it does have a CL button which duplicates the timed('instanced') animation layer and makes it empty. This so you can use it to color or clean without having to manually set all the different instance lengths like you had them in the animation layer.

A tip for Paul regarding instances.
because you will be animating between individual instance heads as opposed to individual frames. it is useful to assign keys for flipping through them.

I myself use the buttons on my Intuos3 tablet for flipping instance heads and still have the arrow keys for flipping frames (which i hardly use anymore)

So depending on what you used to flip with before, consider changing those keys/buttons to flip instance heads instead.

I have a time tested, comfortable work flow honed out for myself and timing has never given me a problem. I don't see myself using this. It looks like something useful for traditional animation styles. This is one department in which I have never felt hindered.

Coloring instances is another matter and I am a bit surprised to see that this hasn't been dealt with yet. Is it in the works? So far, dhomas' Marker/Tracker plugin has worked well for us as a work around. I wonder how the majority of people here deal with this and how popular his plugin is.