[Bf-funboard] Icons for VSE

[Campbell Barton]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Knapp <magick.crow at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was using the VSE today. Not something that I do very much and I
> loaded up a little film from my camera and had to problems. Luckily
> for me I new how to fix them but newbie is going to be at a real loss.
>
> First one is easy. Which strip is the sound and which is the video?
> Clearly you can read it on the side panel, if you happen to have it
> open and know to look there but would it not be much easier to just
> have a little icon on each strip? A music note on the sound and a film
> icon on the other? Simple fix BIG improvement in usability.

I think icons would be a step backwards,

Consider complex sequences where there really isn't any room for icons:
http://www.sintel.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/animatic.png

IMHO it would further clutter the UI.

>From what I've seen most other apps get around the confusion by having
dedicated audio channels.

For blender we could improve this by displaying the waveform in the
audio strips, currently this is done only for sound loaded into RAM,
which isnt so efficient - but it would be possible to cache the
waveforms for non-RAM audio strips.

> The next problem is a bit odder. When you load the strip in the sound
> is about 2 times longer than the video. This is because my camera
> records in 10 fps and the default for blender is 24 fps. It is VERY
> hard to understand that you have to go to the Render panel and change
> the fps to get it to load up correctly. Why can't blender just read
> that from the film and load it correctly? I mean all my other players
> do and when you look at the film strip info in VLC it is there. It
> could at least have a popup window that asks if you want it set to
> 10fps and perhaps even ask about the dimensions and have that set to
> 640x480 (my cam) or whatever is correct for that film.

Agree this is a real problem, this is simply an issue the sequencer
has no good solution for - the FPS has to match, if it doesnt - you're
really out of luck (you have to re-adjust the FPS in some other
app)...
Blender does have a time effect that works too and can probably used
to adjust FPS - but I think this is a pretty messy workflow.

> --
> Douglas E Knapp
>
> Creative Commons Film Group, Helping people make open source movies
> with open source software!
> http://douglas.bespin.org/CommonsFilmGroup/phpBB3/index.php
>
> Massage in Gelsenkirchen-Buer:
> http://douglas.bespin.org/tcm/ztab1.htm
> Please link to me and trade links with me!
>
> Open Source Sci-Fi mmoRPG Game project.
> http://sf-journey-creations.wikispot.org/Front_Page
> http://code.google.com/p/perspectiveproject/
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-funboard mailing list
> Bf-funboard at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-funboard



-- 
- Campbell