Leo germani wrote:
Hi all,
I am happy to announce that we are about to effectivelly contribute to
cinelerra. This could happen through the Pontos de Cultura project of
the ministery of culture of Brasil, who have hired Estudiolivre.org
<http://Estudiolivre.org>.
Sounds great!
We beleive they are great features (the faders for audio and video,
and the possibility of automating camera and projector...) but the way
they are today they are not very usable.
Agreed! But looking at your comments, the annoyances you see seem to be
different to the annoyance I see, (and many other complainers on this list)
What really annoys me is at the moment, the ranges of the all automation
curves (that control floating point variables) are currently shared,
(i.e. the range for an audio track, typically need values from -80 to 6
dB), projector / camera zoom ranges are ALWAYS positive, and generally
go from .0001 to 10, and projector / camera translation control are
generally of the order of -1024 to 1024 (depending on your image size).
At the moment, each of these curves has the same range when working with
the curves. This I consider is the most annoying feature about
automation curves and the one that should be tackled first. My proposed
solution is as follows:
At the moment (in the SVN version) there exists in the status bar:
text box
[ -100 to 100]
where the text-box is an editable box where you can type in different
ranges depending on your job, (i.e. adjusting the zoom, adjusting the
projector, etc.) My proposal would be to convert it to
dropdown text box button
[type] [ -100 to 100][log/lin]
With this idea, each curve is of a type (zoom, translation, audiofade),
and the range used on the track depends on the type. Rather than having
three text-boxes for each type, you have a drop-down list, that can be
used to select the range for each type. Additionally, each type can use
a logarithmic or linear scale, (probably really only applicable to the
zoom!!)
The annoyance you seem to be talking about is that of turning on & off
the automation curves per track. At the moment, I don't see this as a
central issue. Though, I think that further down the line it may be nice
to have the ability to add a "select curves to show for each track"
feature later on. I personally think that an ability to save a set of
curves on/off states would be cool as well, but these are all extended
issues.
This is purely my idea of making the automations slightly more user
friendly to use. (I don't quite see them as "not usable"!!) You may
come up with your own.
I do want to say, that I currently LOVE the ability to manually set the
limits of the ranges by typing the values in. I edit videos that are
recorded from talks taken at gatherings. sometimes the mixer forgets to
pipe the audio through the mixer, but a small mic somewhere picks up the
sound. What I really appreciate being able to do in cinelerra is type
in a range of [0 to 30] and then drag the curve to the top of the track
and know that the volumen is at 30 dB, and then drag the curve to the
bottom of the track and know that the curve is at 0.
If I didn't have the editable text boxes, cinelerra would have to assume
the levels I typically liked to jump between, and then I would have to
guess what cinelerra was assuming I wanted!
Given this train of thought, it may also be cool to have an
implementation of "snap" values for the automation curves.
Anyhow, I went way over-time with my discussion of the problem,
Regards,
Pierre Dumuid
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