FEATURE REQUESTS: Erasing elements, timeline editing, simple animation

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    These are important feature requests. Please review and add to you backlog? I have written them as User Stories.


    Notes: To animate anything I currently I have to create multiple copies of the same element in different positions, and overwrite those copies with white copies to hide them. This is time consuming and makes my scribe much harder to edit.


    A related problem is that editing the Scribe can only occur at the end of the timeline. If I need to change something on the screen at the midpoint of an animation. I cannot see the positions. The only way to see it is to pause the animation during playback, and then try to find the element on the timeline.


    To create an animation with many elements I ended up doing screen captures of VS screens and combined elements, and creating large images in GIMP that I will overlay on part of the VS, without any drawing. The "animation" is done by cutting and pasting in GIMP. It is very slow, but much faster then doing it in Videoscribe. In fact i would not have done it in VS because of the complexity and how slow it is to do.


    The following stories would have saved me days of editing time.


    Erasing elements

    As a VS Author I would like to be able to create simple animations by erasing elements or moving elements, so that I can save much time and effort.

    Verify an element can be erased at some point in time

    Verify I can set the point the element is erased

    Verify I know where the erase will happen on the timeline


    Editing the scribe by timeline position

    As a VS Author I would like to view and edit the Scribe at a particular point in time on the timeline, not just the end, so that I do not have to guess at where things are hidden.

    I can stop Scribe playback, and the screen shows the current state of the Scribe.

    I can edit the Scribe at the point in time indicated on the timeline.

    I can click on an element in the timeline and the Scribe updates to that point in time.


    Moving Elements from point A to B in time

    As a VS Author I would like to be able to create simple animations by moving elements from point A to point B, so that I can save much time and effort.

    Verify an element can be moved from point A to point B

    Verify I can set point A and B for an element

    Verify I can set the A position in the timeline

    Verify I can set the B position in the timeline


    4 people like this idea
  • I quite like these ideas thanks for sharing...

  • +1 for most of these features, especially the ability to erase images (or text) once it has been displayed, without having to draw a blank white box over the top of the image. Also, the improvements around timeline editing would be great.

     

  • To R Dymond,


    It sounds like your scribes are rather sophisticated. You would probably benefit from creating each of your elements separately in VideoScribe, they combining them in a video editor such as Camtasia, Premiere, etc. These packages have multiple timelines which enable you to have multiple animating elements on the screen simultaneously.


    VideoScribe is ultimately an animation package, which excels at creating whiteboard animations, but there are infinitely more effects and options available in the broader world of video production. 


    Personally, I would rather see Sparkol enhance VideoScribe with more unique animation features, than to reinvent video editing features available elsewhere.

  • I agree that some of the features are more advanced than you would expect from VS. However, I do think that a simple feature to enable you to erase an object after it has drawn (without having to use the scribble tool) would be good.

    I have some videos where I display some text which an image is drawing. At the moment, the only way to remove that text is to draw a whitebox over the top of it which means you lots of extra boxes on your diagram. Ideally, having the ability to introduce a pause in the object properties and then have it disappear would be good.

    Regards,
    Paul

     

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