document size & camera layer

This is sort of an extension of one of the ideas jeremy had: setting document size.

Using the camera layer you can set the size of your export…as long as the camera layer is selected when you export. Otherwise it just uses the size of the viewport, which is completely arbitrary and next to impossible to control simply.

I had some ideas that i thought might make a lot of sense in this area, but the more i thought about it, the less sense they made, particularly when considering multiple camera layers. If you have two cameras, you can change the render size to be different in each one…how or why would you set a single document size when you have the ability to render the same animation at different sizes and aspect ratios, and multiple “angles”, just by selecting a different camera? Most of my seemingly good suggestions were pointless when this fact made itself known to me.

I do have a minor suggestion or two, though. One is the possibility of showing the camera properties of the selected camera in its frame somewhere…camera name & dimensions, at this point…maybe more info in the future. I suppose it would be good if this info were able to be toggled off, to keep the viewport clean. I know you can double-click the layer to get this info, but it just seems simpler to have it displayed as part of the camera frame.

The zoom/rotate/pan works to move the camera’s view around, but is there a way to move the viewport’s view of the camera itself? If you have a camera that is larger than the viewport, for example, how do you see everything the camera sees?

There was one other thing that came to mind, but i seem to have forgotten it…i’ll add it later if it comes back to me.

that one other thing…the ability to set a default camera size in config, while not terribly important, would be nice as a feature some day.

@mikshaw “…If you have a camera that is larger than the viewport, for example, how do you see everything the camera sees?..”

I think you are referring to something similar to the following comments (on the issue repository):

@kaiko: yes, that first one is what i’m talking about. If you set a camera size larger than the size of your viewport, you can’t see what the limits of the camera’s view are. So some way to zoom the view of everything, including the camera, without zooming what the camera sees (i.e. what is rendered) would be good.

The second one i’m not sure of. At first i thought he was talking about the safe zone that is often found in video editors and 3D programs which displays a border slightly smaller than the camera view, to show the area that might get cropped off with certain types of screens.