Blackmagic Forum

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I agree. I like where you're going with your ideas Theo. I think cleaning up has become necessary at this point....whether it be in form or function. And now would be a good time for them to think about it, as they are about to bring in a lot of new users.
A simple first step would be to not ship a script if it doesn't work. There are scripts shipped with 7 that don't.

I agree, it seems like a common sense move at this point and I'd have thought it would be relatively easy to do and very helpful.

If Fusion.MenuManager works in 8, that would take care of a lot of these issues.

I agree with you guys on this, 100%


Anybody want to list out their ideal layout with fusion's current toolset?
would be nice for Dev to hear Fusion users thoughts on this.

I 100% agree that the shipping macros are old fashioned. They don't represent useful production processes anymore, and they aren't even examples of good macro construction.

I disagree with Theo on many of the category changes, though. That's why I'd like to see a return to customization. For instance, maybe Tween should be in the Time category AND in the Optical Flow category.

I agree with Theo and like to point to the "Tracking" and "Paint" sub menus which only have one tool each.

Maybe that cleanup could be extended to other context menus as well? I remember that Firefox once recorded which menu items were clicked the most to help them arrange the menu items better. Such anonymous usage statistics could be collected by Fusion during the beta if a user is ok with that.

I can imagine that some items in menus like this could be moved to sub menus. Or that users have grown accustomed to either click "Animate" or "BezierSpline" in an input's context menu but never need to have both items (since they are seemingly doing the same thing) while "BSpline" is in a sub menu, lumped together with modifiers that just by their names sound like they actually modify values.

I think it was Stuart who once explained the reasoning behind it but from a UX point of view...it's still weird. To me at least... and I'm probably totally wrong in assuming everybody uses the context menu the way I am or is sometimes confused by them in the same way. But here's more to get this off my chest

• when an input is already animated, the context menu has the "Insert" sub menu which isn't visible on non-animated inputs. Using the same logic, wouldn't it make sense to hide the "Modify With" and "Connect To" sub menus - since neither can be clicked and they just make the context menu larger?
• the publish item is inactive, but there's now an Insert -> Publish item. Couldn't the top-level "Publish" item be used to insert a publish modifier on animated inputs?

Stefan Ihringer wrote: Or that users have grown accustomed to either click "Animate" or "BezierSpline" in an input's context menu but never need to have both items (since they are seemingly doing the same thing)

Only if you have the default animation modifier. You can change what "Animate" does. It would make sense, though, to hide "Animate" if Bezier Spline is your default.

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Chad Capeland wrote:

Stefan Ihringer wrote: Or that users have grown accustomed to either click "Animate" or "BezierSpline" in an input's context menu but never need to have both items (since they are seemingly doing the same thing)

Only if you have the default animation modifier. You can change what "Animate" does. It would make sense, though, to hide "Animate" if Bezier Spline is your default.

Yeah, that's how it was explained to me before. I think "Animate" is a perfect label for a menu item... maybe the Bezier Spline option should be moved into the "modify with" sub menu where BSpline is located. That way the only users who'd have to retrain their muscle memory are those who have changed the default to BSpline yet have still used the BezierSpline option on a regular basis. I don't know how many of them there are...

Stefan Ihringer wrote:

Chad Capeland wrote:

Stefan Ihringer wrote: Or that users have grown accustomed to either click "Animate" or "BezierSpline" in an input's context menu but never need to have both items (since they are seemingly doing the same thing)

Only if you have the default animation modifier. You can change what "Animate" does. It would make sense, though, to hide "Animate" if Bezier Spline is your default.

Yeah, that's how it was explained to me before. I think "Animate" is a perfect label for a menu item... maybe the Bezier Spline option should be moved into the "modify with" sub menu where BSpline is located. That way the only users who'd have to retrain their muscle memory are those who have changed the default to BSpline yet have still used the BezierSpline option on a regular basis. I don't know how many of them there are...

Yeah, having both at the top makes no sense. For some users, fine, they can edit that menu, but for the default user, there's no need to have both.

I'd also recommend changing the default toolbars. In previous releases, they were the place to put new tools, but since there are no new tools in Fusion 8, maybe it would be nice to winnow the default toolbar down to represent tools that are actually commonly used.

Not a bad idea.
Would be nice to also have that 'shared' like bins, so your team can use the same toolbar for the show/project etc.. or even allows the supervisor to setup and distribute new toolbars.