VEGAS Pro 16 (307) Storyboard positive feedback and improvements

Harold-Linke wrote on 11/4/2018, 10:30 AM

I would like to say thank you to the development team. The new and updated storyboard works very well for me and supports my general workflow in creating a rough cut very well.

The storyboard give me a very nice overview on the overall project including what part of each clip was selected for the final timeline. This feature is very helpful for me.

Also the stability is greatly improved and I am able to work on storyboard with several hundred clips without a big problem.

The new "refresh button" seams to solve some big issues in synchronising the timeline and the storyboard. It is a bit annoying to have to click the refresh button everytime I change a little bit in the timeline or the storyboard. But I can live with this if this improves the stability.

Main request:

What would be very welcome would be the possibility to assign a keyboard shortcut to the storyboard refresh function.

This would greatly improve the workflow with the storyboard.

Other issues:

the storyboard has problems when the same clip is used several times in the timeline. Independant of if it is a copy or different parts of a longer clip. This shoul dbe corrected.
it is not possible to move a clipWhen moving a clip in the storyboard using the "ALT"-key it is not possible to move the clip over the boarder of the visible area. The storyboard should scroll up or down when I drag a clip to the edge of the storyboard.

Other improvement ideas: (lower prio that the keyboard shortcut !!)

it would be nice to have an indication of the length of the selected clip in the storyboard. A good palce for this info would be in the middle of the thumnail near to the starttime
When you select a clip in the storyboard the corresponding clip in the timeline is selected and the timeline cursor is located at the start of the clip. This is very nice. In my system the selected clip is at the right end of the timeline and only partly visible. I think it would be nicer to have the selected clip in the middle of the visible timeline to have a chnace to see it completely. I would propose that the start of the selected clip should be in the middle of the timeline. Do other users agree?
When you select a clip in the timeline, nothing happens in the storyboard. It would be nice to have at least the clip also selected in the storyboard (and also brought to the middle of the storyboard if it was not visible).
You can jump through the storyboard using the arrow keys. This is very nice. It would be nicer if at the end of a line the right arrow key would select the first clip in the next line.
again: Bigger thumbnails would be nice (was already discussed earlier)
when there are more than 50 thumbnails on the screen visible, the several thumbnails are refreshed when hovering over different clips. (workarround: reduce the number of visible clips - make them bigger)

All in all I like the new storyboard. Please keep up the good work and provide little improvements step by step.

Harold

Comments

Kinvermark wrote on 11/4/2018, 1:08 PM

Great post! I agree totally.

To reiterate:

1) Build 307 is a major improvement for storyboards. Not seeing any crashes, but three issues remain: re-sizing thumbnails appears to cause loss of hover scrub, multiple instances of the same clip on the timeline are not correctly updated in the main storyboard, and (most importantly for me) 50 or more items causes continuous thumbnail refreshing (reported bug).

2) Keyboard shortcut for storyboard refresh = YES

3) TOTAL Length indicator and IN/OUT length indicator = WOULD BE VERY USEFUL

4) Other mentioned items. Agree, but I need to investigate further for specifics.

Additionally:

1) Thumbnail creation: There seem to be two approaches used in software: Cached (eg Adobe Bridge) and dynamic (Premiere, Resolve, Vegas Pro). I prefer cached as they are PERSISTENT, so when switching from folder to folder or when scrolling large numbers of clips, they appear INSTANTLY.

2) Hover scrub and IN/OUT points: To be truly useful you need to ne able to do this accurately, which means the display preview must be large enough. For me, I cannot do this on a thumbnail, but I CAN do it in the TRIMMER.

So, would be totally fantastic to be able to "wire up" the thumbnail hover scrub for trimmer preview. (Can now double click - hover trim - "A", so still workable).

(Note: Trimmer can be set to show divisions in seconds so really easy to see how much time you have selected.)

3) Minor point: It may help some users' system stability to be able to DISABLE thumbnail hover scrub.

VEGASDerek wrote on 11/5/2018, 8:21 AM

Thank you both for the feedback in regards to our storyboarding feature. This feature is just the beginning of some major workflow enhancements we plan to do with VEGAS. Many of the items are things was already planned on doing. The few that are not in our backlog we will make note of and consider in the future as well. This feature will continue to be a big emphasis for our team.

Dee wrote on 11/5/2018, 9:59 AM

All really good feedback, thanks! It will help make the storyboarding workflow better.

WRT Kinvermark's thumbnail creation comment, VEGAS 12 provided improved thumbnail generation via memory caching, which provides very low latency, over the original disk-based caching. Along with looking into the 50+ item refresh issue, we'll revisit the cache sizes for any performance improvements.

Harold-Linke wrote on 11/5/2018, 10:14 AM

@Dee, @VEGASDerek thank you for your fast feedback and considering our ideas.

@Kinvermark , I fully agree with you, it would be fantastic if Storyboard and Trimmer would work together as you described

Harold

fr0sty wrote on 11/5/2018, 8:17 PM

I've already sent this idea to you guys via e-mail, but I'll post it here as well in case anybody else has some additional feedback that could further improve it...

Beat detection, detect the beats in the music and place storyboard elements along those beats. Perhaps it could be something that generates markers on the timeline, then another script that runs and places the storyboard clips on the markers. That would also give a visual representation of where the beats are on the timeline. If you take that path, please include a way to quickly remove the generated markers once we're done with them. Allow us to choose to place items on every beat, every other beat, every measure.

Does anyone have ideas that could help add to a feature like this?