Hi
I suggest creating a "suspend"  feature,  so that we can suspend the animations for any amount of time we want.
This feature will be good if it is accompanied by an "exclude" feature, so that you can assign what to suspend and what to animate. 
For example, suspending the characters animations but excluding the camera, so that you can move the camera around the characters. 
this really would help to direct the movie very well and easily without needing to adjust many keyframes
In addition, we can also have "slow down or speed up" animations feature. 
So that we can accelerate or decelerate the animations easily
These feature would really save a lot of time and work. 
Thank you