Committed to develop the Edit page? Or not?

Great! I think I found my new DAW. Been meaning to give it a try and it looks really well done and really well supported. About to edit a bunch of podcasts so I'll soon give it the sink or swim test.

Nice! I used Samplitude for about 18 years before switching to Reaper and I've loved it. One thing you'll probably want to do is change the theme (Reaper is fully themeable) as the default theme is kind of "meh". lol After trying out several themes, my all time favorite is called Peace by Ice Cold Milk. The original developer apparently said they weren't going to keep updating it, so another Reaper user (sockmonkey72) took it over and made some nice updates to it.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=266755
Just download the .ReaperThemeZip file, double click it and it automatically loads into Reaper.

Thanks, folks.
I came for the chili, and stayed for the strawberry shortcake!
Errr… for the Edit Page and the DAW, respectively.
Do I remember that external links are restricted on this forum? There’s a good outline of REAPER on Wikipedia.

You're welcome. There are many great resources for Reaper, the The Reaper Blog and Reaper Mania YouTube channels are both fantastic.

Also, I certainly didn't mean for this to become entirely about Reaper, but I brought Reaper up so heavily because of a couple long-time Resolve users who believed that adding a lot of customization options wasn't possible without "bloating" the software. Hopefully this discussion has caused them to reevaluate their beliefs about customization options hurting the software, because that is simply not true. One of the biggest appeals of Reaper is the fact that it is so flexible that you can customize it to fit your workflow and make it comfortable for you. It would be awesome if Resolve was like this too.

What he said!
There's also a lot of benefit for the developers as when there base product is very customizable it means a lot of dev can move from laborious and error prone coding to higher level customization. I bet a big reason Reaper is such a small download it's because a lot of it is written in Reaper customization script. Just like EMACS for anyone who remembers that.

I imagine Resolve already does a bunch of this with their platform independent GUI toolkit.

And to give Resolve credit due, most of the heavy lifting is already there. The keyboard is quite customizable and a great deal of the commands are available. I think the difference is that in Reaper EVERYTHING is done that way. Again probably because they use the same mechanism to code Reaper itself.

Resolve uses this approach for metadata. The metadata inspector is totally regular and consistent because it’s not hand-coded. There’s a schema and the UI is generated from that. Would be impossibly complex and error prone to have hand coded such a thing for every attribute- and such a beast would be less consistent and thus harder for users.

I suspect that’s the current state of much of settings. Making it schema-based would help both the users and the devs.


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And to give Resolve credit due, most of the heavy lifting is already there. The keyboard is quite customizable and a great deal of the commands are available. I think the difference is that in Reaper EVERYTHING is done that way. Again probably because they use the same mechanism to code Reaper itself.

Exactly! Resolve is SOOOO CLOSE, but it just needs some minor tweaking to get it all the way there. I know most of my feature suggestions are already partially implemented in Resolve already, so they wouldn't need to start from scratch.

I haven't dived into Reaper's coding languages (aside from some lua scripts), but it certainly seems like what they make available for users is also what they use for Reaper itself. I know that all of the audio plugins are coded that way, there is a wrapper which allows you to load all of Reaper's internal effects and third party plugins in any other DAW. They are certainly coded the same way.

It's an added bonus when there is a large user base who can add new features that are not currently possible in the application. This also frees up developers to work on other tasks. I just saw a video from a game sound designer demonstrating third party tools created for Reaper that improved his workflow, this is merely a small taste of what is possible:

The way you can completely manipulate Reaper to fit your needs is crazy. After using Reaper, no one will ever convince me that "my way or the highway" is the best design approach for Resolve which is trying to be an all-in-one solution. Everyone works differently, has different needs, preferences and workflows. The more flexible and accommodating the application is for different workflows, the better.

Yes and... coming up with well thought out defaults is still crucial!

Yes and... coming up with well thought out defaults is still crucial!

Personally, I would put that as a lesser priority. As long as I can change it and export/import my settings, then I only have to do it once. I don't mind spending the time customizing it to the way I want. I did that with Reaper, including creating custom actions to swap some of the mouse wheel directions and speeds to what I wanted. I would LOVE to be able to customize the mouse wheel (and buttons) like this in Resolve.

And that reminds me, having this kind of customization (mouse wheel and buttons) would also allow us to fix the inconsistencies between the different pages in Resolve ourselves. Instead of BMD trying to figure out which way to make consistent across the entire program (not everyone will agree on it anyways), just let us customize it ourselves and worry about other things. I dislike most of the defaults in Resolve anyways and certainly some would object to changing 99% of the defaults... so just let me change them myself.

Totally get that for you the defaults don't matter. You're a software dev so you are fine digging deep enough to come up with what you like.

That's not going to be true for most users. Which is why I say that defaults - keyboard commands, menu structures, etc - matter a great deal for most users.

Totally get that for you the defaults don't matter. You're a software dev so you are fine digging deep enough to come up with what you like. That's not going to be true for most users. Which is why I say that defaults - keyboard commands, menu structures, etc - matter a great deal for most users.

Sure, I'm not opposed to having good defaults in general, but getting a consensus on what good defaults are would be worse than trying to herd cats. The Resolve forum/community is very different from any other product forum I've been on. Given the amount of push back from long time users over changes that wouldn't even affect them at all (like an Auto-crossfade option lol), I can only imagine all hell would break loose if many of the defaults were changed at this point to make everything more consistent and intuitive. That's why my focus would be on letting us change the defaults ourselves and have a well laid out preferences menu, with a search feature, to be able to quickly locate the feature we want to change.

I posted this elsewhere but I feel it belongs with Andy's long post in this thread.

DaVinci Resolve releases over time

Thanks for the chart. And for reminding us of Andy's great list if editor improvement requests.
If you're up for it, I'd be interested to see that chart split out into separate lines based on the main foci of each release - i.e. for the edit page line there wouldn't be a dot if said release didn't do much for the edit page.

just to add my 2 cents to this great list for improvements, are the whole Markers engine. They need an overhaul. As noted there is no option for saving column layout in preferences, they default to original on restart. In dual monitor view, markers get squashed on the lower shelf of secondary display. Is this a joke?
Why can I not bring them full height to a position convenient and useful? Why can't I edit marker color label or delete on the markers panel? Apart from the fact that no markers show up in source view underneath the clip, making it completely useless. no option to go to end of spanned marker.

Performance wise why can't effects be disabled for source view items?

Apple did it because they want to target iOS almost exclusively.

I thought they did it because it had to be rewritten as 64 bit?

I'm still required to use the Cut page to view Media Pool content in Source Tape mode. Seriously? That function was added 3 years ago, why can't I do this in the Edit page yet, and why not in the Media page? .

This would be fine

Apple did it because they want to target iOS almost exclusively.

I thought they did it because it had to be rewritten as 64 bit?

That too! FCP7 was very long in the tooth - having been written pre-OSX. It needed a rewrite for many reasons. In the end they didn't want to put the resources in to make a fully-functional FCP7 replacement so they wen't for something both innovative and far simpler to code. I suspect it's the enormity of the dev hours needed to rewrite FCP7 that made them decide to abandon it.

I'm still required to use the Cut page to view Media Pool content in Source Tape mode. Seriously? That function was added 3 years ago, why can't I do this in the Edit page yet, and why not in the Media page? .

Agreed - it sure is a wonderful feature and I wish I could use it in the Edit page.

I'm still required to use the Cut page to view Media Pool content in Source Tape mode. Seriously? That function was added 3 years ago, why can't I do this in the Edit page yet, and why not in the Media page?

Huge +1 here too! That is the one and only thing I open the Cut page for, but I'd much rather have it in the Edit page.

Well...

DaVinci Resolve 18.5 is here, and still...

Yes, this is a huge upgrade with several improvements. For editors, mainly automatic subtitles and transcripts.

But: the Edit page remains unattended. Just a few minor things, like selecting all clips below play-head. And that's it.

Strong emphasis, again, in the Cut page.

Oh, my...

Blessed are the things you have now …

Just quickly wanted to acknowledge the dev's quiet response in the latest versions.

Somewhere up above I collated some 50+ requests, old and new, that I dearly hoped would be considered... some of them were directly addressed n 18.5.

Allow user mappable keyboard shortcuts for switching Timeline View Options, Video View Options and Audio View Options.
Added in 18.5

Add ability to export Edit Index from the Edit Index window.
Added in 18.5

Add ability to adjust audio/keyframes in Edit page on the fly ie during playback (like in Fairlight).
Added in 18.5

Add keyboard shortcuts for Volume Up/Down.
Added in 18.5

Add a function to export stills from the Edit page Source and Timeline Viewers.
Added in 18.5

Add support for drag and drop video track re-ordering in the Edit page Track Index window... it already works for audio tracks.
Added in 18.5

Delete Empty Tracks should ignore locked tracks. If it's locked it's locked, that status should be respected.
Addressed in 18.1.4

and one other sort of got a look in...

Add a keyboard modifier function to toggle trim behaviour in currently selected mode ie to ‘ripple edit’ whilst in Selection Mode and ‘resize edit’ whilst in Trim Mode.
Not the two-way Edit page mode modifier requested, but v18.5 saw the Cut page get a one way (Ripple Off) modifier... it's a start.

Many thanks to all involved in making that happen, it's truly appreciated.
Hopefully a sign of more to come.
Cheers
Andy

Many thanks to all involved in making that happen, it's truly appreciated.
Hopefully a sign of more to come.
Cheers
Andy

+1!

+1 - I agree that if we are going to expend the energy to constructively critique Resolve, we must balance that with kudos to Peter and the dev team. Thanks for listening.

+1


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