Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Walter Soyka] “Treating a pixel-altering effect as an intrinsic property of a layer locks you into a fixed render pipeline*. Does the levels/curves/3wayCC render before or after other effects? What if you want to apply it in between other effects on the layer?
Treating as many things as effects as possible give you some easy user-controlled variability in the pipeline; you control the render order by manipulating the stacking order of effects in their control panel.”
Absolutely. A lot of the challenges – and solutions – in compositing are about controlling the order of operations.
That and controlling shades of grey 😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “What do you mean by inefficient?”
Inefficient is probably not quite the right word though I did say UI-inefficient which is not quite the same thing. I mean that the implementation of layers and precomps is such that the information that you need to see and get at it is obscured by the structure of the UI.
I’m surely not alone in finding that the basic principle of having to step into a precomp is sub-optimal from a compositing point of view. I know there are ways you can make it less inefficient, but inefficient it surely is. As I say you wouldn’t ideally design it that way.
Equally, it’s not easy enough to see that state of a layer from an overview of the interface and that makes for inefficiency given how critical that information is.
One of the major challenges of UI design is surely to identify what information needs to be topmost and most accessible to the user. I do think the incremental evolution of Ae means that these design considerations aren’t addressed as well as they might be if you were starting from scratch.
But then it really is seriously hard stuff …
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “But once they are there, it is so damn easy to map things in FCPX/Motion.”
Hah! Agreed about X and it’s getting better all the time on that score, but don’t get me started on mapping in Motion – it’s almost beyond belief how primitive it is, or rather how little of what you need to be able to map you can actually map.
Very strange – but then everything about Apple’s attitude to Motion is strange in the extreme. Almost as though there’s nobody left who understands how good an offering it actually is and how vastly better it could be with a little love (and, I’m afraid, to say some better image processing know-how).
The guys who originally built it did a simply extraordinarily brilliant job on so many levels without any doubt.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “If we were re-building the Ae UI from scratch, what fundamental design assumptions would we change?”
Wow! I think if we were to go there, we would need to get paid for our input 😉
In my limited experience of it, UI design is one of the hardest things to get right, while at the same time being the easiest thing in the world to pick holes in!
It’s incredible how much time you can expend simply on the design of a single legend … so, overall, it’s a massive undertaking to think about designing a UI for something as hugely complex as Ae.
But just on the broadest level, Ae layers and precomps are really Ui-inefficient in my view …
Retires to a safe distance once more.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Let’s put FCPX away for a second (Aindreas will be happy about that) and ask ourselves can the Ae/Pr interface be more efficient? I think we could all agree on “yes”. While the panels let you customize to your hearts content, how much of that customization is wasted space?”
I couldn’t agree more – everything about the Ae UI screams to me of legacy architecture that could so obviously be done differently. No-one in their right minds would build the UI that way if they were starting today. But it kind of works and does present a lot, and I do mean a lot, of really dense functionality reasonably effectively.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Bring FCPX back out again (sorry Aindreas), and using the color board as an example, I can open the color board (command-6), choose exposure (command-control-e), page up and down to the pucks, and use arrows to adjust the pucks. I then go to color (command-control-c), bounce to the puck I want, and go. Command-4 zips all that back up. All of this is without selecting anything, or constructing a new panel diagram to bounce between.”
We’ll have to agree to disagree on that. To me, to notion of tabbing to a different panel to adjust the saturation because I’ve just tweaked the gamma really goes against the grain and it’s something you just don’t have to put up with in any other grading environment. Grading is surely all about the interaction between the different controls, and not a process where you first adjust one thing then go off and adjust another. At least, most colorists will tell you that – which is one of the main reasons for using a physical interface that allows you to simultaneously makes adjustments to two different parameters, rather than have to do it serially.
Grading with a mouse is bad enough, but adding to the serial nature of the process by having to tab around as the Color Board requires you to do really seems to me to be pushing things in the wrong direction.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t work, but from a UI point of view there is surely no question that it is sub-optimal.
[Jeremy Garchow] “X’s method is far form perfect, but there is an efficiency to it that I appreciate, and the keyboard customization interface, in my personal opinion, is pretty sublime.”
Sublime is quite a claim 😉 There are still a few things that I’d like to have shortcuts for that don’t seem to be there, or maybe I haven’t worked the shortcuts hard enough?
I think overall that Apple have, as is their wont, put a good deal of good thought into the UI design of X, but I just think there are limitations, which as far as they are concerned fall into the category of “good enough” that they currently seem a little too prone to embracing.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
I’m going to annoy you all here and just mention that a lot of this is much better handled by the Motion model where it’s ridiculously easy to get to everything all of the time.
And I’ll admit that Motion doesn’t allow for quite the same degree of complexity as Ae, but quite clearly allows for vastly more complexity than FCP X.
And then having lit the blue touch paper, I shall retire promptly.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Oliver Peters] “I appreciate trying to keep it on track, but yes, info is always helpful.”
Isn’t this the forum where it’s virtually mandatory to have at least a dozen insane (but incredibly interesting) changes of direction per thread?
😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “I’ve published a workflow which extends live text templates with expressions [link], allowing the user to hijack extra text entry fields to control non-text comp elements, too.”
If anyone hasn’t watched Walter’s demo of this, I heartily recommend it – extremely clever (as one would of course expect! and extremely useful.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Adobe apps, in general, are a really big click fest. I want the tools we use most, like levels, curves, some sort of real honest to goodness color correction even, to be easy to get to and understand. “
Hi jeremy,
Hope the keying is going OK 😉
I do wonder whether you’re not underestimating how many tools you have a your disposal in Ae versus the relatively vastly smaller toolset in FCP X? Editing just needs far fewer tools than mograph or compositing.
I can testify from trying to write plug-ins for it that the Inspector in X is very hard to deal with. You very, very quickly run out of space and while there are a few space savings gizmos (twirl-downs and hidden menus) that you can deploy with some more advanced UI-building trickery, it still isn’t easy to make something complex that doesn’t feel cluttered and cumbersome.
And the fact that the space is horizontally fixed is a real issue for the naming of parameters and so on – you have to keep them short, which is sometimes quite unhelpful.
The exact same plug-in in Ae or Pr seems to luxuriate in huge amounts of space – and of course you can always very easily as the end-user make that space as large as you’d like.
And let’s not forget that X has its own slightly tiresome sub-menu system just where you don’t want one and that’s in the Color Board. You absolutely should not have to tab between those separate spaces while grading – Color, Saturation and Exposure really should be accessible on a single panel. Of course you can get used to it but it’s far from ideal and I’d suggest it’s only the constrictive demands of the Inspector that mean this tabbed model was a necessary economy.
I do agree that once you’re used to the space, X “feels” pretty good and quick to get around – but it’s a long way from being an ideal model. On balance, I do prefer the (historical) mess of Ae where you can at least customise it to the way you like working even if imperfectly.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “Think about how the poor grave accent feels. Grave accent does all the work, and tilde gets all the credit!”
You definitely get a better class of joke around here.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com