GSoC 2021 : Video Sequence Editor strip previews and modification indicators - Feedback

Contributing to Blender Summer of Code
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For the 2. part, are you aware that the VSE modifiers do not have any icons currently, so they’ll need to be designed(by someone?) too.

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You should probably ask in the new icons for 2.8x thread.

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yes i know, need to talk to design guys later once the strip thumbnails are done.

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If the icon-on-strip thing is something you and your mentor are agreeing on, the icon design should be started asap, since it can be a quite time consuming process.

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Thanks for take care of this later, is a really helpful feature for storyboarding and layout in Blender

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The drawing code for the thumbnail has been added in the soc-2021-vse-strip-thumbnails. The current look of the thumbnails is just drawing them one after the other, between the handles and below the text. The first thumb updates on sliding the left handle to represent the current frame but it is drawn in full. Check (gif in task description)

There are some ideas for the way it could also be drawn :

  • Current :
    image

  • slight gap between the thumbs (works well for dark frames, could have dark background in the entire thumbnail region)

    image
    image902×332 67.2 KB

  • similar to colour strips, fills the entire width.

    image
    image741×349 68.4 KB

  • Other - Please specify as a reply

0 voters

There is some error when drawing the last thumbnail at the right side of the strip. And the loop for the thumbnails doesn’t break when the thumbnails can’t be seen so the update for that will be pushed soon.

Any feedback welcome.

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The experimental build is up here - Blender Builds - blender.org under the soc-2021-vse-strip-thumbnails. The current build has the drawing and caching ready. Around this weekend the parallel job for the thumbnails might also be ready. Any feedback is welcome!

One feedback is the slightly laggy UI when doing a strip slide, work is being done on this. And some feedback on the drawing part that you can look at here - ⚓ T89143 VSE Strip Thumbnails. The current version looks like this :

https://dev-files.blender.org/file/data/otfib3sxnq7fznldmok6/PHID-FILE-vag7lb4madwojjcqc4si/cache_thumb_updated.gif(image larger than 6144KB)

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16

Great work! I love this! Even if it is a simple addition, I think that the lack of strip previews has been one of the missing features that has pushed me to use other NLE software, and I am likely not alone in that regard. Thank you so much for working on this!

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Thank you for the response! Glad to hear that

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The thumbnails make it so much easier to “read” the timeline, I tried it out and it worked great even on a small project. I can’t wait to try it again when you have parallel processing working to make it more responsive, keep up the great work!

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The most exciting feature for the VSE in a very long time. Can’t wait till it lands into master!

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Hi @quantimoney - are there any new builds of the latest thumbnail branch planned for Blender Builds?

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not yet, I have been working on the thumbnail parallel caching job. Its in the branch if someone wants it, but there is still i think one or two bugs to sort out. So mostly after that there will be a new build.

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A new build has been created and its in the website now.

Points to note - it is buggy and i think it crashes when you delete all strips from the editor. Other than that it should be fine. I had fixed those bugs I was talking about and it was working smoothly, but the performance was bad, so the last week I tried to improve it, but college work got in the way. I have done some hack to make it faster (its in the build), still have to put it in a proper form. I don’t have any real scenario testing file so anyone who has used VSE in the past and have that file it would be great if you could test it and give any feedback.

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23

The strips work nice and fast here, well done!

When resizing, would it make sense to use a cached image either side of the slot while that tile is getting rendered, rather than show a solid color? :thinking:

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that is a good suggestion, something like showing the previous frames itself, but once job is done only then I update the drawing.

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25

You probably know this, but at certain zoom levels there is a 1 px wide gap between the first and the second image. Doing ex. transforming this gap seems to flicker, and so does the pixels of the first image. Maybe it’s a rounding or variable precision issue?

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yes ik that happens, its regarding the IMB_crop, need to see where exactly a rounded value is sent

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The code is in master finally! There were some tweaks left, and the Blender devs had some suggestions that @iss and I did, but it is a much better version now than before. If anyone finds any bugs, it can be put as a separate task in d.b.o.

@MalDuffin The solid colour isn’t shown now, it is all images. Some wizardy of @iss there to get the closest frame to show if the images are available.

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congratulations! Will test it in the next couple of days!

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