[Bf-committers] SVN commit: /data/svn/bf-blender [37537] branches/soc-2011-pepper: == Simple Title Cards for Sequencer ==

[Joshua Leung]

Hey Peter,

Cheers for the feedback!

Indeed, as I started to pick through things, the issues faced by users
who would want to use this as a base on which to start extending it in
some ways did come up. Sure, a script which sets up a generic template
would be nice in this situation, and is one way I'd thought of doing
it.

Some factors which made me favour this approach though were that:
1) Using this approach, we let automation take over making sure that
the text fits and is aligned nicely in frame when things change. From
experience, I've ended up scaling and re scaling text, moving it all
over the place trying to get it to fit and be in frame. Registering a
special operator for this, and/or trying to find somewhere decent to
put it so that it can be easily found is an issue.

2) Text colours can be set in one place with this method, without
fudging with material settings (and doing material-unlink dances after
copying some text and deciding you want it a different colour - then
again here, the level of control over this stuff is entirely
hardcoded)

3) AFAIK, scene strips were synonymous with constantly being
re-rendered and re-evaluated every single time they're encountered,
when doing scene evaluation combined with rendering is a comparatively
sluggish process for Blender. The alternative would have been to force
people to always render these out to image files (something that I'm
trying to avoid here) before they could be used.  (*1)

4) With this approach, including text in the sequencer feels more like
a "first-class" entity than just a weirdo heavy-duty workflow, where
you have a proliferation of "scene" strips in your timeline which are
essentially just there to display text (but outwardly don't
communicate this)

5) There's also the issue of a buildup of scene files in the file,
each one for a different slide, making it easy to accidentally delete
the wrong one from the file, and also making it slower to find the
scene to go in and edit its text.  (*2)

-------------

(*1) From your mail below, it sounds like that's something the cache
voodoo might be able to take care of under certain circumstances. As
only a very infrequent user of VSE, I wasn't aware of this.

(*2) I'm not really convinced about the idea of these template
parameters for the scene strips. It sounds even more like a
specialised hack from user perspective than shoehorning an entire
strip type with some predefined slots where people commonly place text
for common purposes.

---------------

Anyhow, as an "experimental" feature, this was certainly a good
exercise for seeing how such functionality could look like, and to
generate debate over what use cases for this sort of stuff users have.
(It was also a good exercise in exploring how the sequencer works,
though I might add that the number of places where you have to
redefine how a new strip type is a bit excessive)

Personally, this is probably sufficient, though maybe with a few more
optional slots for text. If nothing else, I can now save off this
build for future use where necessary ;)

Perhaps as you suggest, an operator which generates some preset
title-card scene setups would be handy to have. Though it's the
details of how we allow people to tweak the content there which
worries me a bit.

Regards,
Joshua

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 10:35 PM, Peter Schlaile <peter at schlaile.de> wrote:
> Hi Algorith,
>
> don't you think, we should add some other extensions to
> blender, that make it possible, to script something like this with Python?
>
> Problem is: you wrote a *very* special solution for a
> very special problem you had, and I'd like to keep the
> sequencer core clean and simple.
>
> Would be cool, if you could specify a SCENE as template and only fill in
> parameters.
>
> Add some tweaks to the SCENE strip, that make it optionally render to
> files by default, add template parameters for the SCENE strip and there
> we go.
>
> Then your title cards will end up as ONE additional scene as template and
> template parameters to edit within the strip.
>
> That is in the long run a much better solution, since you give people the
> freedom to make title cards or even fancy title cards as they like.
>
> You can add a Python script, that wraps this all nicely, so that you can
> add some default title cards / whatever. (Which could add a template SCENE
> automagically.)
>
> BTW: I personally use additional scenes within the same file, length 1,
> which get extruded and animated properly. That way, the SCENE is rendered
> once into the memory cache and the cached result is animated (with fades
> etc.)
>
> If I didn't get the problem correctly, just let me know. I really like to
> work out a generic solution for that!
>
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
> ----
> Peter Schlaile
>
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