capture panel over timeline makes it hard for artist to track progress

[BigRoy]

Problem

An artist came up to me asking about the positioning of the capture panel on screen since he found it annoying that it would pop up over the timeline. Specifically because that way he was unable to "know" how far the capture is along the timeline.

Goal

It should be trivial for an artist to know the progress of the current capture with some sort of visual indicator.

I was thinking of maybe adding a small embedded timeline at the bottom of the capture window so that the progress (the current frame tick) has a visual indicator within the popup panel. Ideas/arguments are welcome!

[mottosso]

I'm all for it. I suggest posting a mockup before attempting to code.

[BigRoy]

Something like on the bottom left seen here:

This is a screenshot from a mel script: shotview

[mottosso]

Yeah, ok. I like where that's going.

Maybe down the line we could have a capture(interactive=True) mode where this window pops up, showing the current frame and what's included, such that a user can start a playblast only when the comment is formatted the way they want.

[BigRoy]

Maybe down the line we could have a capture(interactive=True) mode where this window pops up, showing the current frame and what's included, such that a user can start a playblast only when the comment is formatted the way they want.

That actually sounds like a first step to capture-gui? May be overkill for the single file capture.py?

I like the idea of giving the artist control like that, but then I would also love them to be able to easily save it out as a preset and alike; again great feature-set for the GUI I think.

This issue is purely focused to having any playblast to visually show how far it's along with the capture (a progress bar almost?).

[mottosso]

Agreed.