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At least one NLE is making great use of the new Touch Bar
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[Michael Gissing] ” But if you insist on driving their software on a laptop then why not give you a hand to make it less painful.”
My point is the implementation shown in the video does not look less painful than just using the keyboard and trackpad (we’ll stick with the out-of-the-box equipment since obviously you can use a Wacom or Tangent panel on a laptop just like you can a desktop).
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Hit “done”“Hmm…I don’t think I quite like the highlights now that I’ve adjust the Shadows”
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Hit “done”I just don’t see that as a step above using the keyboard and trackpad in Resolve given that you’ll have all of those adjustments available at the same time in the GUI. I think the TouchBar can be useful, I just don’t think how Resolve uses it (at least how it looks in the demo video) is useful.
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Regarding tactile feedback, I keep meaning to try palletegear.com, and I recall a similar conversation when camera lenses moved to servo motors.
Haptics is the fancy word I learned, but that’s exactly the concept!
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I will attempt to make the point ad nauseam: the difference between touchscreen and touchbar is the contextualizing. It’s an important difference, imo. Touchscreen is just a mousey thing in general, what is on the screen is on the screen and you tap it, click, Wacom it — even if it was really fancy and followed your eye movement, it’s still Cartesian X,Y stuffs. Contextualizing is much different.
In After Effects, select a layer and it displays changes to the interface-display: click down the twirly and the display changes, and so on.
Contextualizing is different because the interface device (touchbar in this case but not necessarily) itself transforms based on what the display is doing also. After Effects (and Adobe really) sort of break down here because they have done such a fantastic job of making GUI inside GUI inside GUI inside GUI … it’s turtles all the way down. LOL. So at this moment, After Effects interface is hard to describe contextually. “I shall try nonetheless,” he said with his finger pointing at the falling sky.
Even though I am setting a keyframe for scale, ALL of the other commands (even the ones that won’t work) are right there on the keyboard (like CTRL+ALT+Shift+\ and it takes me two hands to execute.
Contextual is the name for the idea that, when I am setting keyframes for scale ALT-SHIFT-S, the command for setting a keyframe for Opacity (ALT-SHIFT-T) should disappear, and other commands should show up: CTRL-ALT-+. So the question is:
Why is the input-device showing the stuff I’m not using (in fact it’s showing everything!) and not pointing out the next command. Here’s a silly example: Launch After Effects, CONTROL-N, [enter], CTRL-Y, [enter], ALT-SHIFT-T, ALT-SHIFT-J, 15, ENTER, CTRL-SHIFT-O, 0, ENTER.
In practice, I find it much more efficient to use my Wacom with touch-on, at my right hand, and the keyboard on my left. I tried using the touch screen to replace the wacom but the problem was ergonomic, my right hand was not resting on anything and my shoulder started to hurt. Wimpy video nerd that I am.
I said all that to repeat myself: touchscreen mousy stuff is different than Contextualizing. IMO, we should demand much more from the touchbar than simply it being mousy-stuff. So, in AE, I should be able to program it/customize it so that when I hit “T” (for opacity) the touchbar shows the icons representing ALT-SHIFT-T etc. mentioned above. Then when I hit “S,” the touchbar switches to the stuff for Scale.
But wait, why even have a keyboard?
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[Richard Herd] “the difference between touchscreen and touchbar is the contextualizing”
There’s nothing stopping touchscreens from being contextual. I’d argue a different point: there’s a major difference between a UI that was built for touch and a UI that has touch bolted on.
The After Effects UI is not even a little contextual, but the decades-old, pen-based Flame UI is highly contextual.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “Flame UI is highly contextual”
I’ll have to look up some videos, since I don’t use Flame — though I’d like to.
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[Bret Williams] “I actually found the touch bar very useful in making our Xmas card photo in Afinnuty Photo. I was using the eraser tool. While using the eraser, without taking my bright hand off the track pad I was able to change the eraser softness, opacity, size etc. Even WHILE erasing.
THAT is the best example Ive found of its usefulness. As a simultaneous additional tool. Really great implementation.”
People are now starting to learn the brand new tool!
Exciting times.Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bret Williams] “I actually found the touch bar very useful in making our Xmas card photo in Afinnuty Photo. I was using the eraser tool. While using the eraser, without taking my bright hand off the track pad I was able to change the eraser softness, opacity, size etc. Even WHILE erasing. THAT is the best example Ive found of its usefulness. As a simultaneous additional tool. Really great implementation.”
There’s a similar use case as you see with the Surface Dial in conjunction with the pen. Modifying a drawing tool, mid-stroke. It’s pretty exciting, because now we have input devices going beyond analog simulations, taking advantage of their own strengths.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
You can probanly do the same thing with keyboard shortcuts I just don’t go that deep into shortcuts. So this is a good use case where they’ve enhanced function with a visible function you wouldn’t think of or wouldn’t usually learn. The team at FCP X wasn’t quite as inspired, placing the mist well know well used keyboard shortcuts and functions in the touch bar. In fact they actually make you take extra steps vs a mouse in many cases.
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https://BretFX.com FCP X Plugins & Templates for Editors & Motion Graphics Artists -
[Andrew Kimery] “My point is the implementation shown in the video does not look less painful than just using the keyboard and trackpad..”
Good point. I hope this beta implementation develops better layouts over time. Personally I hate trackpads and turn mine off on my office laptop as it mucks up typing on the keyboard. Good multi button mouse is preferred. So a touchbar isn’t exciting or particularly ergonomic to me.
As this is a newish idea I am not surprised early layouts will be software engineer driven not user but at least Blackmagic does respond to feedback and requests. Much better idea might be the ability to customise like they do for keyboard layouts or enable macros to be expressed on the taskbar. For me though, editing on a laptop isn’t preferred and I have no reason to use Mac hardware or OS anymore.
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[Bret Williams] “they’ve enhanced function with a visible function you wouldn’t think of or wouldn’t usually learn”
This raises a cool issue (ok maybe not cool but at least nerdy): knowledge, acquisition v learning. It’s easy enough to google for detailed explanations, but the touchbar solves a fancy problem because it hides all the stuff you don’t need. It constrains the number of cases, whereas a keyboard has all the shortcuts all the time and the combinations are crazy complicated and that makes them really hard to get into your head and hands. As a species we do really well with inductive knowledge acquisition when there are constraints on the number of cases we generalize from. Long story short: holy crap it’s hard to acquire keyboard shortcuts, and so instead we have to learn them — usually by looking it up in a technical manual and or website — or by asking the creativecow.
For me, the touchbar as input device is a revolution (in that Thomas Kuhn way). I hope it catches on.
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