Blackmagic Forum

It would be great if there were an option for a more compact interface. Many of the interface elements are simply much taller than they need to be. While I can certainly understand this from a design standpoint and trying to make the application easy to understand for new users, but once you know where things are located it would be much nicer to just have additional space for actually working.

There are lots of toolbars and things present on every page which could reasonably be reduced to half of their current height. This could mean being able to fit 1-2 additional video tracks on the edit page, for example.

Working on a single screen is a challenge which is why I use two. But, switching to a single screen, here are some things you can do to get more real estate. The arrows top left and right halve the height of the drop down columns.

Charles Bennett wrote:Working on a single screen is a challenge which is why I use two. But, switching to a single screen, here are some things you can do to get more real estate. The arrows top left and right halve the height of the drop down columns.

What would be nice is if when you switch to the single view like in your first photo, the Viewer now acts as the source as well. So if I have Live Media Preview on and scrub over a thumbnail, it would show the contents of the clip, if I then switch to the timeline the Viewer becomes active.

You can. With the Inspector off you will see a white rectangle top right. Click on that then enable Inspector again. You can now switch between Preview and Timeline using the Q key. If you double click on a Media Pool clip it will automatically switch.

Charles Bennett wrote:You can. With the Inspector off you will see a white rectangle top right. Click on that then enable Inspector again. You can now switch between Preview and Timeline using the Q key. If you double click on a Media Pool clip it will automatically switch.

Thank You, Thank You, Thank you. This changes how I work when I'm on my laptop so much.

bclontz wrote:It would be great if there were an option for a more compact interface.

That's too broad a request for us to really discuss, or I suspect for BMD to implement.

Can you be more specific?

Well I'll be more specific then. This is just on the edit page, for example.
1. Bar along the top with Media Pool, Effects Library, etc.
2. Playback controls under video preview area.
3. The bar that shows the timecode and where you are at in the timeline.
4. The bar at the bottom to select different application pages.

Just take a look at how much vertical space those 4 things take up. Most of them contain needlessly large icons that could be reduced in height. Most of these bars even leave more than half of their horizontal space empty and wasted.

Go take a look at internet browsers from years ago like Netscape Navigator and old versions of Internet Explorer, then compare to modern browsers like Chrome. You see how they have massively reduced the size of interface elements in order to give more usable space? I'm just talking about the same kind of thing here.

Number 4 is customizable. You can right click the icons and select wether to show icons and labels or only icons. You can also remove this bar completely (Workspace > Show Page Navigation).

Don't forget that you can also make Resolve totally fullscreen, removing the Windows title bar.

bclontz wrote:Bar along the top with Media Pool, Effects Library, etc.

What about it? You looking to resize it? Move it? Eliminte it? All of the above? Something else?

roger.magnusson wrote:Number 4 is customizable. You can right click the icons and select wether to show icons and labels or only icons. You can also remove this bar completely (Workspace > Show Page Navigation).

Nice, I didn't know about that. Every little bit helps!

Jim Simon wrote:

bclontz wrote:Bar along the top with Media Pool, Effects Library, etc.

What about it? You looking to resize it? Move it? Eliminte it? All of the above? Something else?

I feel like most of these bars could be half of the height that they currently are without any negative impact. In fact, there is already a bar directly under that one which is about half of the height...
Moving things around might or might not make sense, but a simple resize seems like an easy way to gain additional screen space.

bclontz wrote:most of these bars could be half of the height that they currently are without any negative impact.

Eeesh. I would vote no. I think doing that would create difficulty, not solve it. The sizes right now are just right.

bclontz wrote:It would be great if there were an option for a more compact interface.

bclontz wrote:There are lots of toolbars and things present on every page which could reasonably be reduced to half of their current height. This could mean being able to fit 1-2 additional video tracks on the edit page, for example.

+1

I agree.
Resole is growing fast, which is great, but the UI team has to think about how to use screen real estate efficiently for all these features and buttons.
We can already see the problems on the Fusion page, where most features that were previously quickly accessible via buttons are now nested in menus, which is annoying and costs time.

If you reduce every toolbar just a little bit, just removing the top and bottom padding you could gain a bit more room. And the padding doesn't have any benefit anyway apart form the visuals appearance. The buttons don't extend into the padding, so Fitt's Law doesn't apply here (e.g. the toolbar between viewers and timeline, and the buttons under the viewers).
I admit, it's not much, but maybe it'd make a difference.


Keep in mind that you can also add shortcuts to the "Workspace -> Show Panel In Workspace" menu items to quickly show/hide panels only when you need them.
For example, I mapped the Effects Panel to "Ctrl + 1" and the Inspector to "Ctrl + 2", because you usually don't need to have these open all the time, but just for the time you are making adjustments.
Ctrl +1 to open effects panel, drop effect, Ctrl + 1 to close effects panel.

Edit:
Did some mockups and comparisons (use the right-click menu for full screen and image download to compare more easily):

Resolve with a thinner toolbar:


Thinner toolbar and viewer button bars:


Thinner toolbar, viewer bars, and top button bar:

Sorry, have to make another post because of picture upload is restricted to 3 per post.

For comparison:
Here's the original Resolve screenshot:


When you compare my mockups with the original screenshot, you can see that you gain quite a lot of room. That's at least one full video track more, that you can see.

Additionally, you could make the toolbar optional and add a shortcut to display it as a "ToolBar menu" that pops up directly under the mouse pointer:

With thick ToolBarMenu:


With Thin ToolBarMenu:


The ToolBarMenu could be customizable to add more commands.
You could even add your favourite (and most recently used) transitions and effects in there to drag & drop them onto your clips. No need to open up the "Effects" panel.
It would give us much more screen real estate and on top of that make editing faster by reducing the travel distance of the mouse pointer to the buttons, because it pops up right where the mouse is.

Here's a comparison of all toolbars. Before and after.
The result is that you have reduce all toolbars to half their height, sometimes even a third!
Meaning, half or more of the space they occupy is just padding.

This is why you should use two monitors if you can. Then you can have a full screen timeline.

Would be really nice to have some sort of a compact mode. There is clearly too much vertically stacked panels with unnecessarily big buttons. At some point of mastery, user doesn't need buttons on screen at all, because he has a keyboard.

Here are options I found that let you increase vertical space for important elements such as tracks and video:

- right click the iphone-style panel at bottom and make sure that labels are hidden. Would be great to get rid of this panel at all, but seems that this is a marketing decision
- use fullscreen and hide windows bar
- at some point I was able to hide something under video (I think play/stop buttons), but not anymore

There is so much useless elements to remove:
- bottom iphone-bar
- scrollbars
- panel over tracks
- panel with play/stop/etc icons

It would be so slick and convenient without all of that.

Just imagine if it looked like this instead! Oh, so nice, it would be the best video editing software in the world

You could make it an option or series of options. Just because some on screen elements are "useless" to you doesn't make them useless to others. There are many who do not use all the keyboard shortcuts so need the on screen icons. You can already turn off the bottom Page Navigation in the Workspace dropdown menu.

Yes, turning off UI elements should be an option of course. Button panels are great for a beginner and they're really good in current state. I called them "useless" because they might be useless to heavy shortcut users like me

Thanks, that's great that Page Navigation can be hidden (I just expected it to be in Preferences -> User -> UI Settings)