John Paines wrote:What I think you're arguing for is one enormous interface, which might suit folks who do "everything". But what about the rest?
Well, I didn't say that. I'm not the biggest fan of the page system, but I don't anticipate BMD will ever do away with it, and I'm fine working within it for the most part.
It's totally fine to have separated pages for separated tasks when those tasks
are separate. However in my mind that does not preclude enabling situations when they are not so tightly delineated.
I gather the Cut page was created for people for whom Edit is needlessly complex. If they add all that Fusion stuff to Edit, then what? A new Edit page, for narrative editors who don't want the distractions of Fusion, which they don't touch from one year to the next?
I don't know what the answer is. Maybe all-brain ur-software is the future. But it's too easy to imagine some kind of Microsoft mush. And then of course people begging for disintegration ("why can't we have a lite version")?
I don't really follow as to what kind of interface you're picturing? Because I can't see how any of the integrations I described would bloat or confuse the interface at all.
> Fusion Spline Editor used in Edit :
Bezier keyframes are needed in Edit, I think we all agree on that? So why not use a proven interface to implement that, one that already exists, is tested and documented, and will already be familiar to some percentage of existing and future users. As opposed to adding yet another new interface that likely looks and operates slightly differently from all the others.
It doesn't even have to be thought of as the "Fusion Spline Editor" - it's a just a curve editor that understands Bezier handles, which is what Edit is sorely lacking at the moment. And as I mentioned in my first post, it doesn't have to be the
only way to manage keyframes; there'd still be Inspector diamonds, which could also support simple smoothing operations as per Jim's suggestion, and there'd still be the simplified curve visible in the layer. What I propose is for the option to also pop-out a full-fat editor to float on top, for more advanced use-cases, and when doing so to re-use code that already exists and has worked well for years (decades?)
> More Fusion nodes in Edit :
This would just be some extra items in the Effects menu; don't need them, don't use them.
> The ability to export the controls of any Fusion node into Edit :
This wouldn't even be visible in the UI unless you go into Fusion and find the proposed right-click option, at which point it adds another control to the Inspector menu. And as mentioned, this is a feature that already exists in Resolve, both in the form of the Text+ control and user-created, static Generators.
What I'd like is to extend this to be available dynamically on any node, via a new right-click context menu or similar option, available on nodes in the Fusion UI. I am confident this would be really easy to implement, and it would be a vast benefit to many Fusion-based workflows, where it would significantly reduce the number of page switches required when doing things like timing Fusion effects to audio. And again it would have no effect at all on users who weren't already using Fusion. If you weren't using Fusion you wouldn't see a single thing different to today.
As for the other integrations I had in mind: I wasn't going to talk about that in this thread, but since you're discussing it here's one possibility: I could see it being very useful to allow the editing of existing Fusion compositions directly from Edit. On Edit, provide the ability to activate on a Fusion composition a small floating frame showing the composition flow. This would appear immediately, floating right there on the Edit page, allowing modifying the composition, and with the Fusion nodes displaying their controls either in a separate Inspector within the new frame, or in the main Edit page Inspector where they'd temporarily replace the Edit page controls while the Fusion frame was focused.
When working with simple Fusion comps this could provide a very quick and easy way to tweak them without leaving Edit, removing much of the need for constantly switching pages. It would not be intended for in-depth Fusion work, but when doing quick changes to existing nodes and their structure it would be much faster than going back and forth between Edit and Fusion.
And the technology to do it exists in Resolve right now; most of it at least. For the fun of it, here's a demonstration of what that could very easily look like:
Nice mock-up huh? Except.. it's not a mock-up. No Photoshop or video editing was used in the making of that. That's actually Resolve displaying a functional Fusion flow and Tools in a floating frame on the Edit page. Achieved by saving a layout in Fusion Studio and then loading it in Resolve. Resolve doesn't expect there to be random floating frames around, so it doesn't close them when you go back to Edit, and they keep working for the comp you had open when you opened that frame.
Of course it's not completely usable today. Hotkeys don't work inside the Fusion frame when it's on Edit, and it's currently a little limited because there's no way to view individual nodes in the viewer. But the fact that it works at all, and only took me 10 minutes of messing about to get going, says to me that a proper implementation would be quite possible, and probably fairly easily for BMD.
So this is the sort of stuff I'd like to see, and which I feel confident would be fairly easy to implement. And, again, none of this needs to bloat the UI or affect anyone who doesn't want to use the features. Make them available only with definite UI actions. Make them configurable, and even disabled by default if you like. It doesn't have to affect non-Fusion users in the slightest, but for those who do use Fusion it could reduce a lot of needless page switching, and greatly streamline the process. And maybe it'd even encourage some people to use Fusion effects who weren't previously.