Hello! My name is John Swenson, and over the summer I’ll be working on various improvements to the video sequencer, including linked strips, preview snapping, and more.
This week I started on the patch for snapping in the preview, since Aras and I agreed that it’s the least ambiguous feature with respect to UI issues and so would be good to tackle first (still need to figure out a clear design for active channels, which can come later). So far I have UI done, and I’m currently drafting changes to the internals in as simple a manner as possible.
Also submitted a fix for preview overlay polling, which makes it more obvious that preview overlays are disabled for different display types and reorganizes the overlay menu a bit (building on Pablo’s changes)
I’ve been continuing work on snapping for the VSE Preview, and made quite a bit of progress.
In the meantime, I’ve been finding and fixing a few bugs related to snapping:
The code is not yet ready for review, since there’s still some bugs with icon drawing (unrelated to the PR) that will have to be fixed. Versioning will also need to be updated and I’ll merge main into the branch once everything is tidied up.
Additionally, there are already a couple operators in VSE that use the term “linked” – bpy.ops.sequencer.select_linked() and bpy.ops.sequencer.select_linked_pick().
I’d like further feedback from people on this point-- could we rename the front-facing names for these operators something like “Select Adjacent” and “Select Adjacent Pick”? As I mention in my feedback thread, the ‘select linked’ operators for VSE don’t operate on any kind of linked data, and only select strips that are directly bordering one another on the same channel, so it’s a bit of a misnomer in this case, IMO.
Here’s a comparison for the handle selection of adjacent strips now, taken from second PR (in both gifs I am clicking rapidly while moving my mouse cursor across. I have “Tweak Handles” turned off in settings to better demonstrate the bug):
Before
After
Also, the consensus is that options to “Link” and “Unlink” strips would clash with the preexisting “link” concept in Blender, so I will be using the terms “Connect” and “Disconnect” strips going forward for that deliverable. GSoC 2024: Sprucing up the Video Sequencer (Feedback) - #44 by fsiddi
That means that you can now once again use the control key to
Select all strips that have the same start and end point
Select all handles at the same time
like so:
This is a little like “connected strips” behavior, but is a keymap-configurable option rather than a strip state. Connected strips won’t require a modifier key, will have an icon, and will support selecting offset strips together (e.g. audio slightly delayed or leading)
Connected Strips Update
Connected strips functionality is proving to be more involved than I expected it to be, since selection is quite complex and I want to make sure that the option works in all possible edge cases.
However, I continue to make steady progress towards completion. Will keep you all updated going forward.
