loop range for any editors with timeline

Oftentime i need to visualize a part of the whole animation in a loop, just to check everything is fine.

I didn't find a simple way to do it in blender, apart from setting the Start and End range of the whole animation, which i find quite inefficient in terms of number of clicks spent compared to what i want to do.

Having used other softwares like Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or even DAW softwares like Ableton, Cubase, Logic Pro, they all seem to have "solve" this problem with mainly two solutions, which derive from the main concept that the loop range is DIFFERENT from the scene/whole project range.

This idea help us not touching the global frame range of the project everytime we want to focus in on a particular section on our animation. In reality, when we want to loop a certain segment of the project, we don't even think about changing the global range settings, but akaik in blender right now, we MUST change the global range start/end points in order to have a custom segment looping. The problem being that now we have to reset it back to the older values (essentially doubling the amount of work everytime we want to loop a custom range: first set the custom range, do your checking, then set it back to the previous global range values).

So, i would suggest doing like the other softwares, which main idea is to create dedicated loop markers.

From what i have seen, there are two main ways to set those dedicated loop markers efficiently:

• using shortcut, for instance "i" for in, and "o" for out, that's what they use in PremierePro, which i find very intuitive, perhaps because those keys are close to each other on the keyboard. So whenever you press "i" it sets the start loop marker to whatever your playhead is currently on...

• another way i saw in other softwares, is gross selection, basically by dragging and releasing the mouse in a certain part of the timeline numbers it sets the looping time range (ie we draw it with the mouse in one go instead of two actions). This is arguably more clumsy and certainly less precise that the first in/out method, so i would add it with a lower priority in the blender todolist, however i still believe that if implemented, it would match some blender user needs, as sometimes we don't require a frame level precision, and the mouse dragging gesture just represents our intent of looping a section with approximate in/out points.

For instance for a walk cycle, in/out precision is crucial, however, to check that the mouth shape is ok on a certain word in a dialogue sequence, absolute in/out points precision is not required (we just need to encapsulate that word in the in/out loop range, which only requires approximate in/out precision).

Hopefully that makes sense.

Long live Blender.