minor issues during fast work

[slowtiger]

I've noticed some minor glitches again ...

1. Often pulldown menus in the timeline don't appear correctly. All I get is a grey rectangle without any menu item. This doesn't happen when I really want to click the menu, but just click it by mistake and very fast. The rectangle disapears when I click somewhere besides.

2. Sometimes when rendering or modifying or cropping projects, the progress bar stops at 99%. It disappears when I click somewhere. The operation is completed flawlessly.

2a. Both behaviours nearly always appear when I started a longer operation and then faded TVP via alt-click on the finder, then later go back to it again.

3. This is more of a feature request: the exposure handle is visible only until a certain number of frames fills the timeline. I understand the logic behind it: it isn't shown when the width of a frame gets smaller than this handle. But I used looong exposures (of several seconds) in my last project which spans 3 minutes in one file, and it would've been nice to be able to drag the handles even in viewing the whole project.

4. Layer groups! I need them!

5. I miss a palette which works like a project window, so I can place and pick colours fast. Right now I had to scroll in the timeline to get colours from other scenes. I know that I can open another project, but that's only good for picking, not dropping colours. It would be nice to have this in a toolbar/palette so it stays with the other tools. (I didn't find a good solution for this in any software so far.)

That said, I must again state my overall satisfaction with TVP. I had to do a coloured Animatic very fast, without a script, just drawing from mind. I did the soundtrack first, then blocked the whole thing in TVP with coloured cards first to set the mood for each sequence. I think the whole thing didn''t take more than 100 drawings, most done in TVP, and some text stuff in Photoshop. The format was an unusual 688 x 382 px, quite small, and a small filesize.

I still do pans and multiplane stuff in Anime Studio because it's much faster there, much smaller files, and easier to change things. But with this combo of three programs, all open at the same time, I was able to work very fast, improvising a lot of stuff during the way.

The 3 min video was sent today, it's a proposal for a competition, and if I'm good enough it will be online in September. I'll keep you informed.