The Animation PropertyManager has not been improved for a long time and it suffers from it.

The main pain points are:

1. Animation is way too fast. With the power of graphics cards, even with the speed slider to the min, the animation is still often way too fast to clearly understand what's happening

2. The number of animation frames for static (5) is too low. (See SPR 440709). 10 would be better.

3. For animation of transient results, there is a limitation of 100 frames. This is a limitation which is now obsolete. We should be able to have more. tihs is important for dynamic analysis, and also nonlinear when you have more than 100 steps.

4. The saved avi file is always HUGE (unlike when saving AVI files with Flow Simulation for instance). We should actively use compression tools and codecs to limit the file size.

5. In 2012, a change was made for animation of NL results and the default step interval is not 1 anymore. This is a regression fro a usability standpoint.

In addition to that, the workflow is awkward: When you want to save an avi, you have to recalculate the animaiton. This can be long.

It is worth noting that none of the fixture, load and connector symbol locations update with the deformed shape. So a "hide symbols button" would be nice - unless we implement a way to have the symbols move with the geometry.

Other nice features could include a display time of each frame proportional to the time step. Currently, each frame of the animation is displayed for the same duration, and this gives w weird feeling to the animation: it seems to slow down adn accelerate depending on the step size used during the solution.

In other words, there is a lot of room for improvement.

The benefits of implementing this include:

1. Usability: Better clarity of results

2. Nicer results, which will have a positive impact on reports, presentations, web sites, etc.

3. This would also demo well - think of how nice the Flow Simulation animations are!

What do you think?