Effects on audio tracks hide begginning of audio graph

Brainstorm
1

I’ve got a bit of feedback here, wondering if anyone else has the same experience as me.

When I am cutting an audio track, the new segment after the cut has the audio graph hidden by the list of effects which makes it hard for me to see (unless I zoom in).

Here’s a before screenshot:

Screenshot Before Cut
Screenshot Before Cut1835×115 6.27 KB

Heres after the cut:

Screenshot After Cut
Screenshot After Cut1841×128 8.14 KB

How does this effect my workflow? This recording is my script read out for the video, so there’s lots of gaps I need to remove. When listening to the audio track I pause when I think I there is enough silence before the next sentence and cut it there. This often results in remaining silence that I need to cut before the next sentence starts but it’s hard to see when I start talking so I need to zoom in to do that.

I was thinking that it would no longer be an issue if the effects stack is either directly to the right of the filename OR at the bottom edge of the audio track. I would really like to see the center of the audio track.

Does anyone else have this experience, should I make a feature request on the bug tracker?

2

There was a similar request recently - though the OP of that one was apparently more annoyed by the clip names, but I figured it was the effect stack that was more of a problem.

It kind of seems like one of those things, where any answer is going to not be ideal
for some use case or another.

I think I’ve personally never really found it a problem, because if you’re looking to quickly trim just one or two frames off the end of something, you probably are (or probably want to be) that zoomed in anyway? But maybe that really is just me?

Maybe we should just add some alpha to those labels? So they don’t entirely obscure whatever they are pasted over?

Either way, I think if we’re going to propose a change, it’s probably one of those things we should kick around here to try and find a good consensus before making it a work item in the bts - to see if we can find a good answer that nobody Really Hates rather than bouncing between whose use case we favour.

1 Like
3

Yeah that post covers the same thing I am experiencing, thanks for sharing.

I was going to suggest that perhaps the effect stack position could be a user option, like top / middle / bottom (or even off).

However something I took from that other post is that their tracks are much skinnier than mine so I doubt an alignment option wouldn’t make much of a difference for them.

Blockquote
I think I’ve personally never really found it a problem, because if you’re looking to quickly trim just one or two frames off the end of something, you probably are (or probably want to be) that zoomed in anyway? But maybe that really is just me?

We all have different editing styles, there’s no right or wrong way.

Turning the effect stack completely off as an option isn’t totally ideal either, as it’s a quick way of seeing where effects are applied, so another option could be “icon only” and it either comes before or after the clip name.

4

As much as I love all things being as configurable as they reasonably can be, I’d be a little nervous about advocating that for this case. We already have a problem where for very large projects having a timeline with lots of clips can really start to bog the UI down and make it annoyingly unresponsive … I’d like us to improve that, so adding even more options that need to be looked up and conditionally acted upon while redrawing the timeline doesn’t feel like an obvious step in the right direction.

I’d much rather we try to just find one good solution that fits all the reasonable uses first.

their tracks are much skinnier than mine

Mine tend to be the same - even with a (pair of) 4k monitor(s), screen real estate is precious, so I’ll generally fit them to the view and collapse any I don’t currently need to see the detail of.

We all have different editing styles

Yeah, that wasn’t “you should be more like me” … just me noting that this sort of trimming and aligning tracks to audio cues is also something I do quite a lot - and until it was mentioned in the other thread, I’d never really thought of it as Something We Ought To Improve, even if I’m not 100% sure what I’m subconsciously doing that they’ve never been in my way.

I’m just trying to put some circles around what problems the current state of things solved, what problems it creates, and what problems we might create if we try to change it.

Turning the effect stack completely off as an option isn’t totally ideal either, as it’s a quick way of seeing where effects are applied, so another option could be “icon only” and it either comes before or after the clip name.

I can’t say I’ve ever really looked there to determine the effect stack for a clip, but it’s there, so I’ve assumed someone finds this useful. Icon only doesn’t feel helpful, since we don’t have unique icons for most effects.

I think I’d be ok with putting them after the clip name on the same top line instead of under it. But I’m not sure if that might mess with people with long clip names and/or short clips.

And putting them at the bottom instead of under the name seems ok at first blush - except that then would mess with the half-wave view (which is possibly another reason I’ve not been annoyed by this - I’ve always preferred maximising the detail of the waveform by only showing the positive half (since they’re almost always going to be almost but not-quite symmetrical around zero).

So I wonder if we should just make them disappear when there is an active mouseover on the clip? We already light up corner hotspots for fade and compostition and the like, so it might be cheap and easy to just hide those labels in that case too? Does anyone have a use case where doing that would be something they’d hate?

5

:+1:

I like that idea, as it’s when my mouse is over the clip and I want to do something when the label is annoying, so that would fix the problem.

6

Yeah, that was my thought - once you’ve ‘engaged’ with the clip, you know what it is (and probably have all that shown in the clip effects dock if it’s also selected), so it’s kind of natural and shouldn’t just be shuffling ‘annoyance’ between different use cases.

@berndmj @Eugen_Mohr Any thoughts on this? Is there some other use case or constraint we haven’t considered? I haven’t looked at whether there are any technical challenges yet (but I suspect we can just link it to the already existing mouseover changes), just considering what optimal UI behaviour should be at this stage.

7

General: I would do the effect name & icon semitransparent like the file name so we can see the audio wave below.

I’m not sure about: hovering over the audio and the effect icon & name gets hidden. One can think the effect is gone.

But as the effect icon is semitransparent and when we hover over the audio clip the effect name can get hidden.

8

Sorry for being late to this party but I am wondering why you are adding effects while still cutting? Get the cuts out of the way, then add effects. Eliminates that I Cannot See Where I Am Cutting problem.

9

That is how my autistic brain works.

10

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?)?

11

I’ve opened an issue on this subject some months ago, here.

12

Just make something similar to

Summary

Sony Vegas

(best GUI for working with timelines and tracks, I have not yet met - but I tried a lot of video editors)

13

Haven’t you been banned (mute) for this?
Because I was beaten, just for asking why they hid “scissors” in the interface, which cut on “time lines”, and not on “mouse cursor”…

And to discuss something further, I have lost all the buzz. Why do you need “open software”, if such an attitude is not different from the Microsoft, who still dream and can not decide what their system will be and how it will come out.

And then they just shut their mouths…