Suggestions to make it more intuitive to add text?

Suggestion
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I have thought of some suggestions which I think may make the adding of text seem more intuitive especially to a first time user.

At the moment, wheras adding subtitles or a video title to a project is easy once you know how, it does involve a rather “odd” first step of going to “open>other>colour”, then either selecting any colour, so it appears in the preview, trimming it with the blue bar to achieve a workable length of clip, creating a new video track, importing it into the timeline, applying an opacity filter and set it to zero, then adding a text filter.

(Or you can negate the step of setting opacity to zero by selecting the colour as transparent).

I’m used to all this now, but to a new or inexperinced user I think it is not very intuitive imho.

So - my suggestions (each one gets a little more complex…)…

Suggestion 1 - add a new menu entry: “Open>Text” or “Open>Create Text”. Selecting this would open a transparent clip automatically in the viewer, set to a duration of, say 5 seconds, ready to be dragged to the timeline, ready for a text filter to be added.

Suggestion 2 - add a new menu entry “Open>Text” or “Open>Create Text”. Selecting this would open a transparent clip automatically in the viewer, set to a duration of, say 5 seconds, AND AUTOMATICALLY ADD A NEW VIDEO TRACK TO THE TIMELINE, ready for the clip to be dragged to the timeline and a text filter to be added.

Suggestion 3 - add a new menu entry “Open>Text” or “Open>Create Text”. Selecting this would open a transparent clip automatically in the viewer, WITH A TEXT FILTER AUTOMATICALLY APPLIED, which might say “Write text here” or similar, set to a duration of, say 5 seconds, and automatically open a new video track for the clip to be dragged to, ready for the user to change the text as nesessary.

Suggestion 4 - add a new menu entry “Open>Text” or “Open>Create Text”. SELECTING THIS WOULD OPEN A SUB-MENU with options such as “Video Title”, Subtitle" and “Text block” for example. selecting a submenu entry would create transparent clip automatically in the viewer, with a text filter automatically applied, set to an appropriate preset for the type of text the user chose in the submenu - (so, for example, the “subtitle” submenu might bring up a text filter set to 36pt text with the boundary box sized and positioned near the bottom of the screen, centred horizontally, which might say “Subtitle”).
As in the other suggestions above, the preview clip might be set to a duration of, say 5 seconds, and automatically open a new video track for the clip to be dragged to, ready for the user to change the text as nesessary.

I have no idea if these suggestions could be implemented a) easily or b) at all, or even if Dan thinks they are desirable, but I thought I’d suggest them anyway to see what others think about these ideas.

1 Like
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No, it does not. Most people want to put text on an image or some end of a video clip. In those cases, you just simply need to add the Text filter to your image or video and perhaps trim the filter. The steps you suggest are only needed if you want to fade in/out or do some other text filtering.

With all that said, I have thought about adding Text to the Open Other dialog; however the UI technology for that dialog is different than that used for the filter UIs. So, it is not easy to expose any parameters there, but it could create a transparent clip with the Text filter attached, which is not the most friendly thing either.

Also, I am not going to add a submenu to Open. I like that there is no submenu, and it goes straight to file dialog. I might make a submenu for Open Other, however, instead of making the dialog show the choices.

Lastly, perhaps effort is better spent making HTML easier and better.

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Fair comments, Dan. Thanks for reading my suggestions anyway, apologies for my ramblings - you make more sense than I do! Very happy to work with it as it is. Keep up with this amazing software. Best wishes, Jon