First thoughts on version 2

wvg wrote on 7/23/2001, 4:57 PM

Overall a lot of improvements that took away some of the rough edges in version one and added lots of goodies. Nice job on the 'show me' feature, which should get beginners off and running fast. Ditto for the easier 'how-to' on the various rendering options. I think most everyone will appreciate the changes to the docking area. Overall much clearer look. Version Two will be a lot simpler for newbies especially.

However for more seasoned users a surprise I don't like that I will comment on in a minute.

First, A Time Display Blopper?
Guys, I've never seen a electronic timer that has a semicolon between the seconds and tenths of seconds display, shouldn't that be a colon? None of your beta testers caught that or did Sonic Foundry really want a semicoln there?

About the Video FX Tab and the new presets:
A nice feature for newbies. However I was grumbling to myself in less than ten minutes because I am a nitpicker, so I like to fiddle with the values. Fiddle a lot. In version one I could just move the slider and fiddle all I wanted going back and forth from one filter to the other without losing the value of the previous filter that was already applied.

Now it seems (I hope I'm wrong) you are stuck with starting with the presets, which if you go back overrides anything you may have tweaked. While you can move the slider once you drag the preset to the preview window, it seems your tweaking is lost once you go on to the next FX filter.

So for example if you apply the filter for brightness/contrast, say to yourself cool, now I'll try another like HSL, then decide wait a minute I want to adjust brightness/contrast just a pinch more or less, you can't do it anymore without re dragging the preset, which changes things back to the preset value losing your tweaking accomplished with moving the slider controls. BIG GROAN!

Sorry for the rant, but that was one of the things I LOVED about the first version. I'm spoiled, I want to be able to tweak one filter, and go back and forth between the various filters and not have VF "forget" what I already took pains to adjust. It seems I've now lost that ability, please tell me I'm wrong. I know this was done to help newbies, but don't tick off your more experienced user base that KNOW HOW to set values! This is a BIG point with me (can you tell?)and I'm sure other nitpickers. OK, I feel better saying it. All and all really like what you did in V2. ;-)

Comments

CDM wrote on 7/23/2001, 7:32 PM

Hi There -
Just to quickly respond to your few points:
Having a semi-colon in the time display denotes the frames. The colon would denote seconds or minutes or hours. If you change the time display to Time or 30 fps, audio, you get 00:00:00. Makes sense to me. Just seems like a choice.
As for the settings, I'm not sure I follow. I just did a quick test, added a video clip to the project, added the brightness contrast, made some adjustments, added another effect, made adjustments and then went back to the Brightness contrast and everything was as I left it. What are you seeing?

wvg wrote on 7/23/2001, 9:56 PM

Regarding the lapse time verses frames:
I selected a slice of a video that was exactly 10 seconds. I then set to first frame as the start point and set VF to loop the timeline. If the last number was showing frames expired, having a source file that has 30 frames per second the last number if counting off frames should have gone to about 300, instead it cycles in what appears to be fractions of a second. What I was saying was this:

Time shown 00:00:00;00 verses 00:00:00:00
very minor point of course I'm just questioning why a ; seperator verses a : that's all.

You said: As for the settings, I'm not sure I follow. I just did a quick test, added a video clip to the project, added the brightness contrast, made some adjustments, added another effect, made adjustments and then went back to the Brightness contrast and everything was as I left it. What are you seeing?

What I'm saying is you now seemed forced to use the presets as a starting point. For example if you pick a darken preset it applies a -10 adjustment on brightness. Sure, you can push the slider to whatever value you want once the slider pops up, but the problem is it don't pop up till AFTER you apply the preset! If you go to the next filter and return to further adjust the brightness you don't get taken back to the slider position YOU set which may have be adjusted by me to say -14, you seem forced to again apply the preset to get to the slider which puts the value back to -10. MADING!

That means my adjustment is overwritten and I get to try again from scratch. This seems like a classic example of trying to help a newbie avoid messing up a video and at the same time frustrating more experienced users that are far more likely to set their own values when applying adjustments.

In version one, Video Factory took you back to where you were in your adjusting. So in my example if I set brightness to -14 in version one if I went back I would nudge it to say -12 or whatever. Now it seems you are taken back to square one if you revisit the filter again getting -10. Not good.

Maybe I'm too fussy. There is no magic formula. Each video needs different tweaking. After all that's why we're using a video editor in the first place. If you are like me, EACH SCENE needs tweaking and if you like to fiddle like I do, you go back and forth time and time again between the various filters until you get the best possible effect. Unless I'm missing something, you can no longer do that. :-(

CDM wrote on 7/23/2001, 10:38 PM

the only thing I'm still stuck on is that I AM able to see the settings that I adjusted after going to another filter. hmmm.

SonyEPM wrote on 7/24/2001, 8:36 AM

The semicolon denotes drop frame NTSC timecode (DV is DF). Colon denotes non-drop. Industry standard.

As far as the fx getting reset, this was never the design. You should be able to add a video effect, adjust, add another video effect, adjust, go back to #1 video effect and all settings changes will be intact. It would be silly to always reset- the presets are merely a reasonable setting/point of departure. If I understand you correctly, whenever you click back to a video effect, the actual settings (sliders, edit boxes etc) are reset. Is that true? We can't repro that here but will keep looking at this issue.

wvg wrote on 7/24/2001, 10:49 AM

Thanks for the information on the NTSC timecode, I stand corrected, I didn't know that.

As far as FX filters here's what I observed. This is one of those things that's hard to describe just in words. I'll try again. Click on the Brightness-Contrast filter, select the darken preset which applies a -10 filter. The preview window reflect the change. Repeat, and another -10 is applied, so at this point we are really talking about a -20 total adjustment to brightness-contrast. Now bypass the preset by just clicking on brightness-contrast in the left most frame and once it is dragged to the preview window it applies -10 filter by default. If you repeat, another -10 is applied and so on. What I'm trying to say is the slider does not reflect the cumulative changes and show a -20 total adjustment if that's what was already applied like it did in version one. That's what I'm talking about. I'm not saying the filter don't work, it works fine, just that you seem to have to juggle what adjustments were made in your head, which you didn't have to do in version one. So if you go off and use some other filter and then revisit the brightness-contrast filter you have to "remember" the sum of whatever adjustments you made instead of seeing by the position of the slider how much was already applied. This does make it very difficult to go back and forth making multiple adjustments across various filters. I really don't want to make a big deal of this, just that under version one I knew where I was and each filter showed the cumulative effect of each filter and unless I'm missing something you can't do that anymore.

SonyEPM wrote on 7/24/2001, 11:35 AM

I'm still a little unclear (my fault). If you add a preset to a video event and adjust it however you like, then save that preset with a new name, that preset will show up in the video fx thumbnail window with all the settings applied. Use it over and over- is this what you want?

wvg wrote on 7/24/2001, 12:18 PM

Maybe my fault for trying to get VF to do something it wasn't designed to do. :-)

No, I don't save as a custom preset, I'm just going back and forth tweaking a little this way or that depending on the scene or video. There's no point for me saving as a preset since then next scene/video will likely need different tweaking.

I just miss VF "remembering" the slider settings which used to be cumulative. So what I'm saying unless I'm missing something, now I have to keep track of how much effect I applied, since version 2 in trying to be helpful at least with the contrast-brightness filter even if you don't pick a preset it always starts out the filter at some set point, regardless how I tweaked a previous setting.

Yes the effect is cumulative in the preview window and in the resulting video, but the cumulative effect is no longer reflected in the slider position so I don't really know what effect I already applied unless I manually keep track.

So from my nitpicker prospective, If I apply the brightness filter and I decide the filter should be set to -14, and I want to revisit this filter after going to another one, then just dragging the filter to the preview window which all by itself undoes my work, applying another -10, so at that point I have a -24 change, so I have to remember it was at -14, then do the one or two point adjustment like I really wanted. You can see how this would drive a nitpicker crazy. LOL!

This in no was is a criticism of how the filters work, they work well, rather it is a learned pattern from what did in version one, and I'm just wondering if there was a way to have the filters "remember" how much tweaking I already did, like they used to so I don't have to manually keep track.

Sorry for taking up so much space on this relatively trivial issue that probably don't matter to most.