Handling of Non-Preloaded Video files needs improvement

[D.T. Nethery]

This is a long-standing improvement request (for example see: https://forum.tvpaint.com/viewtopic.php?p=104284 )

TVPaint still needs improvement when unchecking the "PreLoad" box , so that TVPaint is only referencing the source video file, but is not completely importing/loading the full video file into the .tvpp project.

(when PreLoad is unchecked the video file is not completely loaded, so TVPaint is reading the file on the fly, as a referenced file)

Preload UNCHECKED.jpg (97.15 KiB) Viewed 2977 times

Unchecking PreLoad helps the video files load up in TVPaint much faster , which is good, BUT then the playback in TVPaint suffers , to the point where TVPaint lags so much it becomes unusable.
It would be a huge improvement if TVPaint could utilize source video files as referenced files that are not fully loaded , to keep the .tvpp file size down, much the same way that After Effects or DaVinci Resolve can use video source files as referenced files , which keeps the overall working file size down in AE or DR project, only fully rendering the source video files when the AE (or Davinci) project is rendered to a composite video file. Otherwise the better workflow for now in TVPaint is to leave the PreLoad box checked and to fully import the source video file(s) into TVPaint ... which results in better playback (if Display preview settings are lowered to 50% preview quality), but makes the TVPaint file expand to GBs larger than if the source video files were not preloaded.)