Shotcut Marker QOL Thoughts

[BlivetWidget]

@brian I’m enjoying the new markers and had some ideas that might improve their usefulness even further.

1. Do you think it would be useful to allow markers / marker ends to snap (to the playhead or otherwise)? Currently I’m finding the placement of the second end to be a bit awkward.

2. Do you think uniform marker colors are important? I think for my use case, it would be more useful to cycle through a preset list of colors (still allow re-coloring, of course) than to default to the same color for each new marker.

3. This would no doubt be significantly more challenging to implement than the previous two, but do you think it would be useful for an imported MLT to convey marker information? I think retaining the markers on an imported MLT could be very useful for editing. Currently I have to have both the master project and the original project open at the same time in order to know where my markers are in the original.

Thanks for having a look.

[brian]

@BlivetWidget

Do you think it would be useful to allow markers / marker ends to snap (to the playhead or otherwise)? Currently I’m finding the placement of the second end to be a bit awkward.

Yes. I plan to work on this.

@BlivetWidget

Do you think uniform marker colors are important? I think for my use case, it would be more useful to cycle through a preset list of colors (still allow re-coloring, of course) than to default to the same color for each new marker.

I will probably not implement color “cycling”. But I plan to make changing the color take fewer clicks.

@BlivetWidget

This would no doubt be significantly more challenging to implement than the previous two, but do you think it would be useful for an imported MLT to convey marker information? I think retaining the markers on an imported MLT could be very useful for editing. Currently I have to have both the master project and the original project open at the same time in order to know where my markers are in the original.

I would have to think about this one specifically. In past discussions, there has been a concept of “clip” markers that would be applied to a clip. I would have to see if there is much demand for something like this since it would be a lot of work.

[BlivetWidget]

Right on, thanks for having a look. I just wanted to float the ideas out there.

[DRM]

@brian

But I plan to make changing the color take fewer clicks.

I’m glad to hear that.
About that color cycling though, I just thought of something. How about like a shortcut key (for the sake of argument let’s say holding Ctrl while pressing M) that would cycle to at most the last 2 colors that were chosen? So if you have a Red marker now and your previous two choices were Blue and Green, holding Ctrl on top and pressing M would go back to Blue and Green and if you press M again then back to Red.

What do you think @BlivetWidget?

[BlivetWidget]

I think color cycling would be more useful to me, and easier to program (no need for any changes to the user-facing interface). You only need a list of colors and an index, then modular arithmetic takes care of the cycling. Like:

colorlist = ['red', 'green', 'blue']
colorindex = 0
# on adding a new marker:
thismarkercolor = colorlist[colorindex]
colorindex = (colorindex + 1) % len(colorlist)
# etc.

[DRM]

Are you suggesting like an automatic cycling where every time you put a marker down it cycles? Cause my suggestion is manual and through a shortcut key so it doesn’t have anything to do with the UI.

[BlivetWidget]

Yes, automatic cycling is my suggestion. Your suggestion is “manual,” but it requires modifying the hotkeys and possibly the hovertext hints, both of which I consider to be part of the user interface. The code would also be more involved, as you have to do everything in my suggestion plus allow the user to define and interact with the parameters.

To me, the color of the marker is not important, but I would like each one to be a different color. I do understand this isn’t everyone’s use case, so I’m just voicing what I would find useful. Brian’s plan to make the colors easier to edit would be a step in the right direction for every use case, regardless.

[DRM]

@BlivetWidget

Brian’s plan to make the colors easier to edit would be a step in the right direction for every use case, regardless

I actually suggested that in the beta thread for this released version. The way it is now takes a lot more clicks than it could be. I’m happy he’s going forward with it.

[BlivetWidget]

Whatever happens from here is a good thing, I think! There’s a lot of potential for the markers to be quite useful, and of course there will be some growing pains.

[Namna]

@BlivetWidget

Do you think it would be useful to allow markers / marker ends to snap (to the playhead or otherwise)? Currently I’m finding the placement of the second end to be a bit awkward.

@brian

Yes. I plan to work on this.

@brian Thank you, I also think it would be a great help

@BlivetWidget

Do you think uniform marker colors are important? I think for my use case, it would be more useful to cycle through a preset list of colors (still allow re-coloring, of course) than to default to the same color for each new marker.

I totally agree with @BlivetWidget , it is very tedious to have to systematically change the color of a marker that you just created.

[brian]

@BlivetWidget

Do you think it would be useful to allow markers / marker ends to snap (to the playhead or otherwise)? Currently I’m finding the placement of the second end to be a bit awkward.

This is implemented for the next release.

[Namna]

Dans les suggestions pour l’amélioration des marqueurs, il serait bien pratique de connaitre la position de la Playhead par rapport à un marqueur sans avoir à faire un tas de calculs.
C’est pourquoi je propose d’ajouter dans le dock marqueurs le/les indicateurs de position.
Voici une capture d’écran que j’ai modifiée pour montrer ce à quoi je pense.

In the suggestions for improving the markers, it would be nice to know the position of the Playhead relative to a marker without having to do a lot of calculations.
That’s why I suggest to add in the markers dock the position indicator(s).
Here is a screenshot that I modified to show what I am thinking about.

Dans cet exemple, la Playhead est 2 secondes à droite (après) du début du marqueur et donc à 11 secondes à gauche (avant) la fin du marqueur.

In this example, the Playhead is 2 seconds right (after) the start of the marker and therefore 11 seconds left (before) the end of the marker.

[DRM]

@BlivetWidget, a feature for cycling marker colors was added in in the December 2022 beta. If you want to test it and leave feedback, you can go here:

Please test the BETA for version 22.12

Introduction This is another conservative release to continue to focus on bugs, but we did throw in a couple of small low risk additions. Due to the conservative nature, during the beta cycle we will not be attempting any risky fixes. We mainly want to ensure no more regression bugs. Please do not report about existing bugs that have not been indicated as fixed by this version. Provide all feedback as a reply within this thread or as a GitHub Issue. If using a GitHub issue, make sure you ind…

[BlivetWidget]

Thanks for letting me know. Marking this as the solution even though it only address item #2 (item #1 was addressed in a recent release, and I don’t think #3 is considered very high priority by anyone but myself).