Any suggested way to add time/space in the middle of a cutscene?

[dgoyette]

One thing I find difficult with Slate is adding more space/time in the middle of a cutscene. With all the Clip, many of which contain animation keyframes, I don’t know how to “shift” over all of the clips in a reliable way.

For example, look at the relatively “simple” cutscene I’m showing here, where some characters are talking. If I just want to add a few seconds of silence somewhere in the middle, it’s really difficult to move everything to the right of some line, such that everything stays consistent. So many of the clips and keyframes are precisely timed with respect to each other, and I don’t see any way to multi-drag keyframes, or stretch things.

Is there any recommended way to handle this? How would you insert some empty space into the middle of a cutscene?

 

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[Gavalakis]

Hello and sorry for the late reply due to summer vacation.

A way to handle this is by using “Sections” however it is still not perfect for very complex cutscenes since keyframes within clips are not shifted (only the clips themselves do). I should be able to make it possible to shift the keyframes within clips as well however. Let me know what you think. Thanks 🙂

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[dgoyette]

I’ll take a look at Sections. I wasn’t actually aware that was a thing. I’ll see if that helps my process, though as you mentioned, not moving keyframes when moving sections does seem pretty limiting. (Most of the difficulty I find in add “space” in the middle of a cutscene is due to needing to move keyframes.)

I imagine that allowing users to select and shift clips and keyframes at the same time could be terribly complicated, both for you to code it, and even for users to use it. I’d given this some more thought, and I think what might be the simplest version of this feature would be similar to audio sequencer tools that let you insert/generate “silent”. I imagine placing the scrubber at some point in the cutscene, and then clicking a button to insert more time at that position. A popup would ask me how much time I want to insert. Then, any clips to the right of the scrubber would be pushed that far to the right, and any clips that overlap the scrubber would be extended by that amount of time. For keyframes on overlapping clips, the keyframes to the right of the scrubber would be shifted to the right.

It’s not a perfect approach, as it could take a bit of trial and error for users to decide how much time is ideal. But it would be a pretty simple way to just insert some more time in the middle of things without completely disrupting all the clips. It doesn’t address the desire to perform the opposite approach (removing a chunk of time in the middle of a cutscene), but I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to do that yet, so I’m probably biased. 🙂

Anyway, sounds like a pretty complicated feature either way, and I have no idea how many users would actually use it.

[Gavalakis]

Hello again. Thank you for your input and suggestions. I will take a look at some way to approach this and see what could be implemented. Thank you 🙂

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