Showtime editing feature request

[dmxlaser]

Hi All,

Showtime is a nice tool for creating shows and various others have already made various suggestions for improvements of Showtime Editing Features.

The majority of these suggestions handles about Start and Stop of events on the timeline in showtime.
So here's my idea.

As showtime has the look-and-feel of a multitrack editor ( as you probably seen before in various audio mixing programs ) why not take over this behaviour ?

Currently dropping a frame on a timeline adds the frame start and with dragging you can position the end of the event....at least that's what you expect.... WRONG...when you drag a frame from location 00:00 to start and expand it to location 01:00, you would expect it to stop at 01:00, but it does not. If there is no blank frame behind it, it will keep running forever.

The same goes for any effects you apply on the frame in the lower sections of the timeline. They keep running forever unless you use a blank frame to stop the scanning. This is not intuitive working.

Why not have the most often used functionality of audio editors. When I drag a sample in any multitrack editor the sample runs until the end of the event, then the audio stops. This should be the same in Showtime.

IN an audio editing tool you also apply effects, panning, etc, etc to a sample, just like you do with the effects you apply to a frame in showtime, but in showtime the effects keep on going, even when the event has finished.

Please Bill, try to remedy this in a future release, it would make show editing that much easier.

Regards,

Peter Broerse
DMXLASER

 

[Pangolin]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the suggestion. Actually, you might remember that we discussed this at the last Pangolin User Meeting.

There is a way to convince Showtime to work the way you describe. You click on an animation and then press "Edit Animation". Then, in the RESET tab, you will see some options which control what happens at the start and end of the event.

In any event, it is already on our list of things to do to add a few new menu items that will allow the user to control the DEFAULT modes of operation. This will be handy for beginning users, and the default behavior of Showtime will be to work the way you describe. I agree that this would be more intuitive, especially for new users. For existing users, we will do something clever such that Showtime will continue to work the way it always had, although these new modes can be invoked even for experienced users.

I doubt that these new modes will make it into the next release of Showtime (due out in just a week or two, and mostly related to changes for VISTA), but they will be in the next major release of Showtime.

Best regards,

William Benner

PS: The default behavior of Showtime is the way it is for historical purposes. Showtime was developed in around 1994, without reference to any other timeline programs, and it certainly predates the *popularity* of timeline programs. (Sometimes when I say this, people argue with me about the fact that there were timeline programs back then. Yes, there were, but they weren't in widespread use as they are now. We developed Showtime "in isolation", without copying the work of others...)