Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Shawn Miller] “Are you saying that the keyframe buttons NEVER change state?”
The keyframe button itself goes grey (!) and the nav buttons behave in an idiosyncratic fashion that is too wayward to even begin to explain.
[Shawn Miller] “Also what is the minimum and maximum values for the scale transforms… the sliders are about 25% to the left, but the displayed value is 100.0%.”
Yup. Mind-bogglingly poor design.
[Shawn Miller] “Are the values on the right scrubbable text, they don’t look interactive”
Good point – they don’t look scrubbable but they are. I hadn’t spotted that.
[Shawn Miller] “and the rotation (knob?), I haven’t seen that before”
It’s an Apple thing and has been for a long while but it’s a terrible, terrible control concept.
[Shawn Miller] ” I also think it’s strange to have a separate slider for uniform scale, a checkbox to link and unlink scale seems more elegant”
Agreed.
[Shawn Miller] “Lastly, is 0,0 really the default anchor point for objects in FCPX.”
Yes, but this is the Apple convention and on balance I think I prefer it to the Adobe co-ordinates system.
You score very highly indeed (why am I not surprised?!), but you’ve still missed a few things.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
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[Tim Wilson] “I’d still love to hear more from your list of schoolboy design errors”
Far too many to go into in any detail but let’s go for an obvious one – keyframes.
Why would you deviate from convention and position the keyframe navigation buttons both off to one side of the keyframe button itself rather than on either side of it?
Why would you choose the make the nav buttons and the keyframe buttons the identical size, shape and colour?
Why would you make the colour hard to read?
Why would you not follow convention and have the keyframe button change colour on a keyframe to highlight its state?
These are all terrible decisions with absolutely no decent rationale whatsoever. Novelty for novelty’s sake, aesthetics over function, and deeply misguided and amateurish aesthetics at that.
And that’s just one set of errors among many. One misjudgement of this kind is forgivable, but when they’re piled up so high you can’t see over the top of them, it’s just rank incompetence.
But come on, this is a competition. I’m not giving away all the answers!
Hint: Look at the use of space, look at alignment, look at legibility … etc, etc.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Indeed, you are quite right.
And “Add Edit” is certainly not helpfully descriptive at all – I remember 20 odd years ago being mystified when I first came across it!
As for “Blade”, we use metaphors from antiquated customs all the time and that’s one of the delights of the way we use language. I’m all for it.
But I completely take your observations about the rest of the FCP X terminology in terms of Library, Event and Project – I’m not sure that the metaphors there are helpful in the same way.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
I was only planning on giving half a point for that. but since you’re always such a lovely guy I’ll award you a full point.
But – and the interns working on this at Apple seem never to have been taught this – aesthetics does not come at the top of the list of considerations in UI design.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Douglas K. Dempsey] “By comparison, “blade” is genius!”
Just to be super pedantic about this, the reason it’s called “Blade” in FCP X is almost certainly because it was called “Razor Blade” in FCP Legacy.
In other words, Shane was wrong to suggest that this was some form of terminological innovation in FCP X – what was he thinking?
😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Ah, OK. It’s easy to forget how much you could do with FCP 7!
This feature was especially important for us as it was the foundation of project sharing between groups of editors.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Robin S. Kurz] “having multiple “libraries” (i.e. projects) open at the same time isn’t even possible elsewhere to begin with, right? Certainly not with FCP 7 nor PPro.”
I’ve read this several times and you appear to be claiming that it’s not possible to have more than one project open at one time in FCP 7.
If this is indeed what you meant, it is incorrect.
It is of course true of Premiere but not FCP 7.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
Use the Extract effect, or even the good old fashioned Luma Key.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Brett Sherman] “I attempted a method like this for selecting colors from a group of swatches. Slightly different in that I was using “Link” instead of “Clone”.”
But using Clone is what makes this work and work so elegantly – and it’s been proven to work with 100% reliability over many years now.
Your method sounds completely different. And yes, you can get into trouble with Link if you don’t proceed carefully.
I would encourage users to get friendly with Clones in general; they are one of the most powerful and versatile features in Motion but are not generally well understood.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki
