- Posts: 4
- Joined: Sun Aug 01, 2021 3:50 pm
- Real Name: Ashish Jatiani
I gave my thoughts on some possible improvements in this post over in the feature request forum:
TheBloke wrote:Yes. The Macro tool desperately, desperately needs an overhaul. The UI looks like it was thrown together quickly with the idea that "we'll do a proper one soon."
Getting a better UI is even more important now that Fusion Effects are being actively worked on and improved. The process for installing an effect via the new DRFX is pretty nice. Making the macro in the first place is pretty awful.
I could see a new Create Macro UI having a drag and drop interface where one can "build" the macro controls by dragging them from the available ones, and be able to easily re-arrange their position or remove them.
I can envisage a split-pane view, with the source nodes and controls on the left, and the macro being built on the right. The source nodes and controls could be displayed in a tree-like structure like it is now. One could then drag the desired controls from the left pane to the right, adding them as exposed controls on the macro. One could also drag a whole node, adding all its controls at once.
In the right pane would be the dropdowns for changing the type of the control and its default/min/max.
Fusion's controls section supports a ton of functionality that is not currently made available in any UI. You have to do manual code editing for most of it. So a new UI could have some kind of toolbar from which one could drag labels, dividers, sections and buttons. There would also be the ability to easily add new control pages to the macro.
Ideally this UI would be WYSIWYG - the right pane would show exactly what the Macro UI will look like for the end user once the macro is added to a comp.
I also really hope we can get some love for the Edit Controls UI, which could be done at the same time. There's still no way to remove controls, other than copying the node to a text editor, manually editing the code, and pasting it back. And the UI for adding and editing existing controls is very rudimentary.
I could see both functions being part of the same base UI, allowing one to both easily add/remove/edit controls on nodes, and combine them into a macro with exposed controls.
So when making a multi-node macro, the full two-pane I described would be seen. When doing Edit Controls on a single node, just the right-hand pane would show, populated with all the controls that node has. It would then be possible to quickly add and remove controls, as well as add pages, dividers, labels and sections as mentioned earlier.