High - Sequencer is counter-intuitive in UX for beginners (list)

A lot of settings in the sequencer should have been ON by default and not hid in obscure menus. Here are some examples:

  1. Quarternion Interporlation. This setting should have been ON by default. The amount of times I ve heard creators get confused why their actors are spinning out of control is very interesting. Its also hidden in a menu that unless you know it exists, you ll never discover (and this comes from a guy that has used countless editors for more than 23 years).

  2. Lack of tooltips. Sequencer is one of the tools that doesn’t explain a single thing if you hover on a technical term. Some examples are relative, additive, or absolute motion. The documentation doesn’t mention anything either.

  3. How annoying the scrolling of the timeline is. This is hard to get right so I ll give some slack. Starting slow and progressively moving faster without a skip would be ideal, as the current skip makes your eyes lose track of the point you used as a reference, then the timeline is one speed so if you want to move faster you cant (unless I am missing something).
    Here is a video:

  4. No indication of time by default. Time is perhaps the most important thing to display, yet it’s not there. I have to press Ctrl+Shift+T as if a beginner will know to do that. I get the argument that the other metrics are also useful, but you have to understand what the audience is looking for and will use the most, and IMO that would be time.

4)Anti-snap. For some reason, if you have snapping off, it is very hard to align the time cue to a key, as the editor snaps before and after the key instead. This is very annoying because if you have snapping off you expect the time cue not to snap at all. Here is how it looks:

5)Scrubbing. This setting should also be ON by default. I ve posted this as a tip to make it easier to work with the sequencer and everyone thanked me for telling them that, meaning they don’t like the default behavior of scrubbing past the start and end.

  1. Why is there a camera shake option in cameras if we have no camera shake available? The menu leads to nothing.

  2. Playback Controls are to the left, and cannot be moved within the sequencer window, which adds a lot of back and forth when you ll start/pause/move to start hundreds of times for a detailed sequence, and everytime you have to look so far away (at least for my workflow). Would love to move them to a spot that I want which is closer to the center of my layout. Here is where it is now:

  3. Sequencer takes control of hotkeys in some cases (for Ctrl+Shift+T for example), but not in others (Pressing space). Not sure if there is a setting to swap that behavior, because I use Ctrl +Shift +T to remove the toolbar and watch the cutscene I am making, but sequencer just toggles time when I do that, even if I have the viewport selected. On the contrary, I want to edit things in the scene and press space to start/stop the sequence, but that wont happen if I don’t have the sequencer window open, which is very counter-intuitive for the workflow. Would love to take control of space, but not control of Ctrl+Shift+T unless you have the sequencer window selected.

  1. Weighted tangents don’t interpolate with themselves

Kind of hard to fix and not useful at all when the tangent creates curves like these:

here is Inkscape tangent interpolation, for comparison:

  1. In curve editor, I can’t see what I am editing at times. Here is an example:

  2. Snapping the end
    As seen from the video below it either wont let me snap the end to the last key, or it would look as if the key wont play at the end. This is confusing as a beginner, would a visual cue that shows that the loop point is correctly placed rather than gray it out.

  1. No control over the interpolation of keyframes from sequencer.
    It gets immensely complicated fast if you decide that a key feels too “robotic” in cubic interpolation and want to adjust it to a larger ease curve. You need to open curve editor, find that specific specific setting you want again, then if you can manage to understand what is happening (because you cannot edit curves of transform, only individual axes or rotation and movement), then you use weighted curves and EVEN THOSE will not do what you want, because they triple interpolate for some reason (more info on point 9).
    In the example below, you can’t control the acceleration and deceleration of the camera as it interpolates from the sequencer.


    Interpolation curves need to be in the sequencer, and multiple values need to work from one curve so its easier and faster to animate, like how Davinci and FL Studio handle automation curves:
    FL Studio:

    Davinci:

  2. Snapping does not snap to keys and its confusing.

As shown in the video below. Not sure what causes it, but it confused me until I zoomed in.