Oh, I hadn’t noticed that the name label is already transparent - though that adds a new twist, because it’s only transparent if the clip isn’t selected. It seems you can move the start of the clip without actually selecting it - but it seems a little counter-intuitive to have to deliberately unselect it before performing an editing action to it (in the case where you need it to be transparent).
I wonder what ‘breaks’ for who if we make both label backgrounds always transparent. I can’t think of anything offhand?
I think I’m now somewhat against putting the effect stack label on the top line after the clip name - having also just realised the icon at the start of the effect label is actually a shortcut button that you can click to disable/reenable the effect stack. That ‘tiny button’ should stay at the edge from a usability perspective. And that means we also can’t put it on the bottom line, because then it would obscure the ‘add a composition’ corner hotspot.
I’m not sure about: hovering over the audio and the effect icon & name gets hidden. One can think the effect is gone.
I don’t think I’m too worried about confusing the user, since it would reappear as soon as they moved the mouse away again, and what is shown in the monitor wouldn’t change. But the icon button is a bigger issue, because if we simply hide it when you mouse over, you could never click it! So we’d need something to always stay at least partly visible if we want to keep that button - and now that I know it’s there, I think I like it and am likely to use it.
[and at the risk of totally scope creeping this request, but similar to temporarily disabling effects - what I would really also love to have is a very easy shortcut to temporarily disable a clip proxy, because sometimes (fairly often actually), I want to see the full detail of some frame to do some action to it, before resuming normal editing with proxies enabled.]
That thought had crossed my mind too, but I figured it was worth thinking through “can we do this better with no downsides” before landing on the “sorry, you’ll just need to fix your workflow” square. And there is always the case of needing to tweak a cut due to some later afterthought about some transition.
And it still doesn’t quite solve the problem, because we had a similar request last month, except for that user it was the clip names they found getting in their way rather than the effect stack label.
In the “workflow fix” dept, it’s also possible to minimise all the other tracks, so that the one of interest expands making the labels less of a problem, but that’s also not the path of least clicks unless we added some sort of ‘temporarily maximise this one’ option, which also isn’t without its own complications.
So I think my “we possibly could/should do” list is now looking more like:
- Make the label backgrounds and icon always transparent (but still changing colour when selected)
- Add a status tip for the effect stack icon, explaining that it’s clickable and what that does, like we have for the fade and composition corner hotspots.
- Think of some nice way to signal that the user wants to temporarily hide the clip labels. If mouseover doesn’t work for this because it would hide a button, then maybe something like “if you click on the labels they disappear until you mouse out (or maybe until you de-select the clip?)” - which again would want a status tip to explain and let people know that function it exists.
Are there other labels we might need to treat this way (markers?)?