Your mouse can be a useful ally for retiming, editing, and creating 3D animation.
To retime an animation, you drag your mouse on a slider. The slider's range matches the range of the animation you are retiming. Depending on how fast or slow you drag the slider, the animation is retimed. If you dragged your mouse fast, the animation becomes faster. If you dragged it slowly, the animation runs slowly.
You can create new animation and perform time-warps by capturing mouse movements on the slider. Again, the slider's range matches a range of animation. For example, to make your character pant, you create two extreme keyframes, say, at 1 and 10. You set the slider's range to (1, 10) and position the slider's thumb at 1. To start panting, drag right for some distance, drag left for some distance, drag right, drag left, drag right, drag left.... At each step, reduce the amount of drag to make the character start panting heavily and then slow down.
Motion capture data contains a lot of keyframes. Almost every frame is a keyframe. Its desireable to have less keyframes while retaining the capture's quality. Here is one method for the task:
The animator begins by setting the slider's range to the range of motion capture. When he drags the slider, he browses through the keyframes. He picks the keyframes he wants, and discards the rest. For example, if there is a run and jump action of a character, the animator would definitely keep the keyframes when the legs touch the ground. He may choose other keyframes highlighting important phases of the action and ignore the rest.
All the above methods help produce high quality animation in short time while providing maximum control to the animator.
All the above methods were independantly invented or discovered by Sampath Jagannathan and placed into public domain.