Just posting a few thoughts and wondering if anyone else has noticed this or feels the same way..
Something about Cinelerra (of all types) that has always really bothered me is the handling of Audio tracks.. It is not my intention to be critical of anyones work these are observations not judgements.
Why do the waveform tracks have to be so large and take up so much screen space? If you look at other NLEs one of the major things that really makes Cinelerras unconventional UI look ugly and outdated is the sheer size, number and visual bulk of the Audio tracks in the timeline view.
Why cant the vertical size of Audio tracks be independently sized apart from Video tracks, often when actively working on multiple Video tracks it would be nice to make Audio tracks much much smaller to get them out of the usable screen space.
Why arent stereo tracks just one visual lane on the timeline with 2 waveforms in one lane? Ive never seen any other application that displays true stereo tracks as individual mono tracks..
How often do people ever need to independently edit each track of a stereo track? to me splitting a stereo track into 2 mono waveforms should be a rarely needed menu option instead of how Cinelerra displays by default.
Almost every other NLE Ive tried puts mono or stereo Audio tracks in one lane of the timeline and Audio effects are applied to one or both Audio tracks with one visual instance of the plugin, no need to attach a plugin to one channel of the stereo track and then apply a copy of the plugin other to the other channel.. Audio tracks in an NLE should really behave like Audio tracks do in any other Audio application like a DAW. For instance in something like Ardour or Audacity 99% of plugins are stereo and the pin connections of how many channels to process are invisible to the user, if you have a stereo track and you apply a stereo plugin the right and left pins are automatically routed, if you drop a stereo plugin on a mono track then it will just connect one side or the other. Since Cinelerra now has the amazing and (very unique in the NLE world) feature to process with LV2 plugins it would be nice if it behaved like virtually every other host of Audio plugins and just let you apply one visual instance of the plugin and let the application invisibly handle the pin routing and automatically apply the effect processing to however many channels are in the lane
Im sure like many things simplifying how Cinelerra works with Audio visually will conversely be tortuous on the coding side of things so maybe this isnt feasible to even look into. I truly believe that both visually and operationally Cinelerras very unorthodox handling and displaying of Audio is a stumbling block to its adoption by new users. Cinelerra doesnt need to be Lightworks, or Vegas or Kdenlive but there is an industry accepted way that Audio is presented in an NLE and if the coding side isnt impossible I think aligning Cinelerra to a more normal workflow for Audio would be very beneficial..
Just my thoughts, Stay safe and stay healthy everyone!
Wow, this is a lot to think about! All I can say is that why cant the vertical size of Audio tracks be independently sized apart from Video? might be easily programmed.
As a visual example here is a screenshot I took that is on my website for AV Linux, this is Cinelerra on two 1920x1200 monitors and Im still cramped for space in the timeline window, the display of Audio waveforms is eating up more than 66% of the visual space! For me this example is a pretty simple project, often I have 5-10 Audio/Video tracks, If I didnt have a dual-head setup and was using a laptop I honestly dont think I could use Cinelerra for making music videos..
I agree with you, the soundtracks take up too much vertical space. In my case I use three 1920x1080 monitors and in the case of this project with four cameras and mixers. It is only by folding all the sound tracks into lines except the one used at each moment that I can display and visualize all my tracks that are useful for editing.
Thank you Phyllis! If we have GG onboard Im very excited to see what can happen! Now that AVL is off my plate for a while I can devote some more time to testing and giving feedback. I hope my recent posts havent seemed impatient, I really enjoy the program and your hard work, there is so much potential!
Started discussing possible solutions but have nothing concrete yet. One thing is for sure is that we do not want to lose the current methodology so have to come up with an alternative choosable option. Because it is already the 18th, gg does not want to start coding anything this complicated and involved this late in the month, so will plan on starting first thing next month.
Meanwhile, I do not know if you are aware of doing this to temporarily save space for the audio tracks.
1 - go to the View pulldown and uncheck Show assets – this will leave only the title bar showing when you load media for all tracks
2 - in the patchbay to the left of each track, click on the right-facing arrow (on the left side of the patchbay area) of each track that you want to see; for example the video tracks and NOT the audio tracks. The right facing arrow will now be a down-facing arrow.
3 - at any time you can click the down arrow to not see that track except the title OR at any time you can click the right-facing arrow to see that track again. Note that when you add a plugin or perform certain operations, the track is automatically expanded to see everything, but you can easily turn it on and off.
Thanks for additional feedback – it helps for us to get perspective and reasoning behind user requests. But I got to say if you really want to feel fraught with terror start looking at the audio timeline program code that has been in place for 20 years and think about changing it to meet current expectations. That is what GG says is really scary!! But he is going to try to come up with something new anyway.
No place to donate yet but @Sam plans this for the future on the website to offset server costs. GG and I do this for fun and prefer not to be obligated to work on any specific thing.
As mentioned elsewhere, we run this website, its infrastructure and developments on a voluntary basis and pay for this project out of our own pocket. The honorary character of this project shall remain, we are not looking for profit. We live the open source and free software idea.
Nevertheless, many people have expressed the wish to support us and we dont want to deny this any longer. For this reason I am setting up a donation page this weekend, so that everyone who wishes to do so can make a contribution and support us. If we can get a pizza and maybe occasionally a small beer together with the donations, then we are happy about it and will enjoy it on weekends when the server and the related services are maintained and new content is created.
Thats great! Ive also been wanting to donate for years, I donated toward server costs way back when when Herman and Raffa were involved with CinCV so it is long overdue for me to step up again!
I completely understand as someone who also runs an out of pocket open-source project for donations that one must be careful about clarifying what donations do before accepting them.. I dont think there is anything wrong with saying something like:
Donations are appreciated and acknowledge the effort that has gone into developing, packaging and distributing Cinelerra-GG and maintaining this site. Donations do not not act as bounties or fund future development and features.
That way you are not beholden to anyone and people who donate are donating out of a sense of gratitude and not out of entitlement.
It doesnt take long to save the current state of a project save as, so if the next step goes wrong it is simple to return to where it was, just hit o and reload the previous state. E. g. A project called Car, lets say the first step is to trim the clips, so load the clips into Cin and save as Car trim.xml, trim the clips and hit s to save when done. Now lets say the next step is to colour correct, so now save as Car trim colour correct.xml, do the corrections and save. Then its audio levels, so save as Car trim colour correct audio levels, and so on.
Perhaps we could help GG and Phyllis by prioritizing things about this issue in the hope it gives some focus for GG to look into solutions? Of course with the knowledge this may very well span over a few monthly releases.. Some bullet points:
Independent vertical sizing of Audio and Video tracks
Option to choose stereo tracks as a monolithic entity that are acted on together for various editing operations (cut/split/copy/paste), dragging, locking/unlocking, applying effects..
Stereo tracks contained in the same visual lane in the timeline viewPlease chip in with other ideas or clarifications to mine!
Yes I agree with the segmentation of the audio track issue. But aspects 2 and 3 seem to me very related, I might not have separated them.
It makes sense to be able to process stereo tracks (for example, the two tracks of a piece of music) together on a single visual track but with a clear view of the double sound track.
But it is also important to make it easy to treat these two tracks separately at any time, if necessary.
Im used to using the two sound tracks of my camera with different sources. For example: either I use my shotgun mic on camera track 1 and a wireless mic on a participant on track 2, or I send my shotgun mic to both tracks but adjusted differently; one in automatic gain mode and the other manually adjusted. I would then treat these tracks differently when editing, using one or the other as needed.
I think what youre saying makes sense and I think elsewhere Phyllis said GG would not be making any changes that would lose the current existing functionality, so I dont believe there will be any loss of what is already there. I would guess some of these features will be user selectable in the preferences or maybe something like a lock channels/uncouple channels button or menu function?
I understand your intention to group a video track and its 2 sound tracks together to form a group that associates a video track with a stereo audio track and that they are locked together sharing lock/unlock status as well as any cut/copy/paste/mute operations.
The basic idea is appealing, but I have several comments.
A limit of 4 groups seems to me to be too little; some projects could contain many more cameras than that. Ive already seen 10-camera shoots and others have used more than that…
As annoying as it is to lose synchronization by a false manipulation, it is frequent that I deliberately de-syncronize my tracks with respect to each other or to the image. Among other things, it is very frequent that I will start the sound of a sequence below the end of the image of the previous sequence, to introduce the corresponding image of the sound only a little further on. The opposite is also possible. This, for multi-camera projects as well as for shot-by-shot shooting.
For me it is essential that we always maintain the potential option of being able to process the different video or audio tracks individually, even from a group.
In addition, we should also consider shooting not in stereo but rather in 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound… It is already possible to shoot with a camera to which a 5.1 surround zoom recorder can be attached. Ive never tried it myself but isnt this a good example of a need for synchronous 5-track grouping that users might encounter.
I think that groups should not be present by default in the timeline space (as a kind of reserved area) but rather be able to be created, as needed and at will, to join as groups the sound and image tracks that we prefer to see associated in this way on the timeline. These grouped tracks could cohabit on the timeline with other non-grouped tracks.
Ideally, it should also be possible to de-group tracks during the editing process to make them independent if it is realized that this would be more practical for the rest of the editing process.
We have split up the following 3 items into phase 1 for bullet 1, which we call GUI, and phase 2 for bullet 2 and 3, which we call GANG -
Independent vertical sizing of Audio and Video tracks
Option to choose stereo tracks as a monolithic entity that are acted on together for various editing operations (cut/split/copy/paste), dragging, locking/unlocking, applying effects..
Stereo tracks contained in the same visual lane in the timeline view
With todays GIT checkin, you can now independently size audio versus video tracks. And thats not all ! You can individually resize any track in the patchbay with a toggle. There is a static Debian 10 tar for testing at:
If there are other operating systems on which someone would like to test, just let us know. We did not build Mint 18 yet but can do so if Pierre would like to test but we are still working so there will be more changes.
See the attached mages showing the toggle on the right side of the patchbay for each track and the second png for the zoombar audio individual sizing. And note the tiny little audio track underneath the normal size video track.
