Setting keyframes straight from the VSE, like in After Effects

I am trying to get rid of After Effects for my workflow and try VSE and the compositor instead.

One thing I often need is that I have say a scene A cutting to scene B and some Infographic Elements overlayed for the duration of both scenes. So far no problem, I can do this in the VSE. Now imagine some element in scene C that needs to be animated synced to scene A and B, for example a thermometer displaying a temperature of whats happening in A and B. What would be the best workflow to set keyframes in scene C depending on timing from A and B. It’s really simple stuff, setting the rotation for example. But I really don’t want to load the image sequences as viewport background or anything like that.

The reason I want this on a third scene and not baked in A and B is for flexibility because if for example I have to change A and the last temperature doesn’t match the beginning temperature in B then I have to re-render both scenes. Hope all of that made sense.

Ideally it would work like in AE that I have some properties accessible from the VSE to keyframe there. In principle Blender can do everything I needed from AE, I just need to find a convenient workflow.

Thanks!

I’ve made some progress: I added a second scene, open a new “main window” (it has to be a main window so you can set it to a different scene), create a new scene. This way I have the VSE open where I add the scene from the second main window, do the keyframes there and see the result in realtime in the VSE. Nice.

One of the things I am still looking for is to either turn off preview caching in the VSE or force an cache update on frame change because if there is already a preview frame rendered it won’t update.