I actually hadn't noticed the Loop Around Layer Button (gonna call it the LALB), but think it may have been one of the sources of my timeline confusion.
Start the app. The LALB is lit (I assume that means active) and if you look at the timeline panel the in/out points (IOP) are set to 0/1.
Create a camera layer. The LALB is now NOT lit (I assume this is deliberate?) and the IOP is still 0/1.
Record a camera move. Cool. You can't play it back though because the IOP is 0/1! If you hit play it'll just stick on frame 1.
Only if you re-enable the LALB button that was originally enabled but has automatically been disabled will it "work" (i.e. pushing the button sets the IOP to the length of the camera move and you'll be able to play back the thing you just recorded). It gets even more confusing though, because:
when you toggle off the LALB, nothing happens because what it actually did was set the IOP to the length of the camera layer, it looks like a toggle button but it really doesn't function like a toggle button at all! Oh and it's also not consistently named - the LALB is actually the 'Loop Clip' button in the timeline view :-)
As if that wasn't already confusing enough, testing it was further complicated by the fact that when you open the app the IOP defaults to 0/1, but on hitting 'new scene' the IOP defaults to 0/120, and you won't be able to replicate this behaviour!!!
Personal note: I understand that some of this behaviour is probably deliberate, and possibly designed to help beginners, but I'm personally of the opinion that this makes the system overcomplex and opaque and really hard to fully understand if you're trying to become "more than a beginner". My personal (boring, I know!) preference would be to stick to the existing paradigm for timeline management that is commonly used in non-VR animation software.
AfterEffects, Maya, Houdini, Harmony and TVPaint all use the same system, and it's pretty close but not identical to the one you're using. They have a scene length, whatever that is, sometimes with no defined upper limit (ie in Premiere and Harmony), and then a 'work area' or 'playback range', which is a subsection of that playback range between an in and an out point, and then they have a loop option - usually something like Play Once/Loop/Pingpong, although I don't think I've ever used pingpong for anything :-) So essentially you've got 4 numbers (scene in, playback in, playback out, scene out) and 1 mode switch.
What they don't do is change your in/out range and loop settings invisibly and automatically, and of course they all have the non-VR advantage of having the timeline view visible by default, so you have a much clearer idea of what's going on. I think it's the combination of the unpredictable automatic changing and the invisibility of the change that gets confusing, and then it's compounded by having a button that looks like a toggle but is actually a shortcut to an action.
I'm not saying it's not a useful action though - we do it in aftereffects so often we call it an IBON, for the shortcut keys you press: (I) set playback head position to current layer's inpoint (B) set playback range start to playback head position (O) set playback head position to current layer's outpoint (N) set playback range end to playback head's current position, so it's definitely useful, it's just confusing that the software is trying to do it for us without us knowing :-)
I actually hadn't noticed the Loop Around Layer Button (gonna call it the LALB), but think it may have been one of the sources of my timeline confusion.
Personal note: I understand that some of this behaviour is probably deliberate, and possibly designed to help beginners, but I'm personally of the opinion that this makes the system overcomplex and opaque and really hard to fully understand if you're trying to become "more than a beginner". My personal (boring, I know!) preference would be to stick to the existing paradigm for timeline management that is commonly used in non-VR animation software.
AfterEffects, Maya, Houdini, Harmony and TVPaint all use the same system, and it's pretty close but not identical to the one you're using. They have a scene length, whatever that is, sometimes with no defined upper limit (ie in Premiere and Harmony), and then a 'work area' or 'playback range', which is a subsection of that playback range between an in and an out point, and then they have a loop option - usually something like Play Once/Loop/Pingpong, although I don't think I've ever used pingpong for anything :-) So essentially you've got 4 numbers (scene in, playback in, playback out, scene out) and 1 mode switch.
What they don't do is change your in/out range and loop settings invisibly and automatically, and of course they all have the non-VR advantage of having the timeline view visible by default, so you have a much clearer idea of what's going on. I think it's the combination of the unpredictable automatic changing and the invisibility of the change that gets confusing, and then it's compounded by having a button that looks like a toggle but is actually a shortcut to an action.
I'm not saying it's not a useful action though - we do it in aftereffects so often we call it an IBON, for the shortcut keys you press: (I) set playback head position to current layer's inpoint (B) set playback range start to playback head position (O) set playback head position to current layer's outpoint (N) set playback range end to playback head's current position, so it's definitely useful, it's just confusing that the software is trying to do it for us without us knowing :-)