Faster access to Fade Handles

Not a fan of this idea as I think it would be too confusing to have to look at the inspector to see what the handles in the Timeline are actually going to do.

Regardless of whether you like the viewer behaviour or not one thing was that it had everything in one place. Setting the viewer to "Open" meant that scrolling through the timeline showed you the parameters for each clip without any clicking.

While I don't mind the parameter settings in the timeline I do find it very clunky. The timeline is already squeezed for real estate and this just makes it even more awkward.

What I'd love to see is an implementation similar to that used in Motion. Where you have a contextual HUD. So click on a transition and select SHOW HUD.

There's a thought, with Apples recent Motion HUD patent maybe it is something we'll see in FCPX.

I've been requesting HUDs in FCP since Motion first came out.

But they don't handle keyframing.

What I'd like to see is the ability to have a keyframe editor below the Timeline just like in Motion. That'd be the best. It'd really rock with a dual monitor setup, too.

Yes that would be awesome.

Yeah, I could see a very efficient setup with the timeline pushed to the second display (giving you lots of height for expanded functionality), with the Event Library and dual viewers (with the amazing horizontal scopes arrangement) stacked on the main viewer.

There are a lot of orientations that would make sense for different purposes- but I don't think more flexibility in either single or dual monitor layouts are something any of us would argue against.

This is what I'd love to see in FCP X 10.0.7: Fade Handels on the video track!



Easy access to Fade handels, opacity control (as we had in FCP 7). And when you look at an edited timeline you can SEE where your fades are (and match them) without having to dig.

And Apple already has this functionality developed, they'd just move it to the clip.



Jon

Hitting ctrl v is pretty fast for me. But again I am a keyboard fan so it is almost natural for me hit the key combinations.

Hit ctrl-V, then click the arrow on the right side of the clip, then scroll down to see the controls, then do your adjustments, then click the X button to close the window. Repeat 100 times. Gets old. And if you have multiple clips stacked on top of each other you end up with a lot of scrolling.

Or select all Clips at once and hit your key commands.

Having them visible would be faster this correct but then there would need to be some polishing with the interactivity with the clips in the timeline.

Noticed how the Show Animation triangle disappeared from the clips in the timeline.

hitting ctrl-v on a clip only shows me a hint that there is a fade applied to the clip but doesn't tell me accurate fade length:



but to access the fade controls I still have to click on the little up-arrow on the right side of the clip. And then the controls are often thrown outside the timeline and I have to scroll to get access to the fade handles.

The worst situation is when I have created stacking clips, say, a title bar with 2 lines of text and 2 custom shapes stacked on top of each other and all faded in and out.



When I select all 4 elements and hit ctrl-V -



where did all the elements go? They're up above and I spend quite a bit of time to scroll up an down looking for the appropriate arrows to click, handles to move, close this window close the other.



All this scrolling and clicking could be avoided if the video fade handles were in the clip face just like they are in the audio track.

I'm amazed how good FCP X is getting and I admit, this is just some details but when you're doin it a lot it does make a difference and I'd like to see it get as competitive as possible. Seems like FCP's main edge is pure editing speed and this would make it even faster. IMHO.



Jon

If you're doing this much tweaking of fades manually, change your clips to the bars, not the large filmstrips as you have them. Save you a ton of timeline real estate.

ok, thanks. I know there are ways to speed it up with shortcuts etc. and obviously the tools are there and they work great. I was checking to see if others wanted to see it streamlined this way also.