I might have gone through animating completely wrong but it would be very helpful if I could see all the IPOs for each object at one time. For example, I have a camera tracking an empty, is there a way to view the keys for both of them in the IPO curve editor? Or view all IPO keys for several objects that I have animated by layers to appear and disappear? so that I can make them happen on the same frame?
Or am I going about this the wrong way? It seems like it would be easy to view all at the same time, color coded or something?
No you can’t do this in 2.49 but it is possible in 2.5. However, it is not possible to animate layers in 2.5 (at the moment as far as I know) and so this might not be of much use to you.
You can use the old trick of simply animating the position of an object to behind a camera, instead of using layers to make it disappear. Just animate a one-frame position from where it was on screen to behind the camera.
You could also setup a copy location constraint to an empty that is parented to the camera. Set the influence of the constraint to 0.0. Then animate your object. When you want it to disappear, just animate the influence of the constraint from 0.0 to 1.0. If you do that over 1-frame, the object will seem to disappear but it will really be translated to the location of the empty which is parented right behind the camera. This technique will work in 2.5 and then you can use the graph editor to view multiple curves at the same time.