V20.06 BETA 2 is available

Yes, I noticed that. Shotcut has put in a nice black frame just before the first transition :roll_eyes:. Yes, I used a zoom setting of 40% throughout the slideshow. I don’t think there were any other flickers.

You ran into the same bug I reported. :wink:

The bug is that first image or video has no animation even if you set one so a side effect of the bug is that when the first transition comes in there is a flicker. I get that too when this bug happens.

Interesting. Oddly I notice that the size/position filter numeric fields are greyed out when I play the first clip One for @brian ?

In my slideshow I used no zoom. When I exported I noticed flashes on several clips, not all, and not the first clip.
All the clips had an SP filter. I disabled the filter on the clips with flashes and it fixed the problem.

Clip 10 with flash. Sp filter enabled.

https://streamable.com/afs75j

Clip 10 no flash after I disabled SP filter.

https://streamable.com/tne03h

That’s probably because the simple keyframes are in the middle of an animation. In simple keyframes you change the values at the start of the filter and on or after the drag handle but not in between the start of the filter and the drag handle.

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You do not need to turn off proxy before export. It automatically exports at full resolution unless you choose the option to use preview scale in export. This is explained in the docs.

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Ah, OK, thanks. I had read the docs but actually misinterpreted them. In that case I should have turned off preview scaling, not “use proxy”, before export. Got it now, please ignore me. Sorry to take your time.

EDIT - actually I misread again - I need to make sure “preview scaling” is unchecked in the “Advanced” tab of the export menu.

@shotcut, I’ll have more to write tomorrow but I wanted to get this one out of the way first.

  • It has to do with the Use Proxy/F4 function. It’d be much appreciated if the function to generate proxies and the toggling in and out of proxy mode were to be split.

Right now I am expecting to hit F4 to toggle proxy mode but every time I go out of proxy mode and back into it this message annoyingly keeps popping up:

Toggling should be quick. Having to constantly answer that pop up stops the workflow. It’s annoying. Also, it asks that question even if everything in the project has a proxy.

  • Another thing is that this creates another annoyance. If you have proxy mode on Shotcut will just start generating proxies for anything new brought in. But if the user wants to bring in clips and not make proxies for them then the workflow would have to be stopped just to cancel the proxies that have been queued up.

It’d be a lot better if “Use Proxy” were purely a toggle function and an additional separate option be added to Settings>Proxy called “Make Proxies” that would be just about that and not toggling modes.

  • I was also thinking about how there is only one way to make proxies manually and that’s by having to go to Properties and select Proxy there. But if there is a lot of media in the playlist and the user only wants to do proxies for certain ones, then they would have go to each item’s Properties and select Proxy there one by one. Can there be a sort of right click option to make proxies from the playlist so that more than one can be queued up at the same time?

  • Another thing is that after hitting F4, Shotcut selects the Master track. Can it be made that it stays on whatever was selected at the time of hitting F4 rather than defaulting to the Master track every time? It’d be a lot better than having to select again what was deselected unintentionally.

  • Another issue I noticed with Use Proxy/F4 is if you are on the Source tab and toggle proxy mode it switches to the Project tab.

  • A second issue with the Source tab when hitting Use Proxy/F4 is that the Source tab doesn’t update. So if you switch to proxy mode the Source tab will still have the original file loaded in the player and not update to the proxy.

  • This one has to do with proxies not accounting for videos with alpha channels. How about having Shotcut make proxies for videos with alpha channels by using the Quicktime Animation preset + the proxy resolution but write the file extension as mp4 instead of mov?

@DRM basically all the answers I have to all your points is “no,” or at least not at this time. Switching proxy on and off reloads the project, which is why it has these side effects. There is nothing instant about it, and you should not need to do it often. You are doing it often now because you are testing. Now please stop asking for more. I honestly don’t have much more to give.

This is fixed for the release.

The filter is also added to handle aspect ratio differences.

Does this problem with the flicker/flash of single black frame only happen when using video clips?
I have not reproduced it yet. Does it appear in preview (with Settings > Realtime on) as well? If only export, does parallel processing option make a difference?

I noticed it when I made the video slideshow. It did not happen when I made the image slideshow.

No. I did not see any problems in preview.

I exported with parallel processing on. Did not test with PP off at that time.

I exported the problem section just now with the SP filter enabled using parallel processing on and an export with PP off. Both exports have a brief black flash.

I have seen the black flash in testing with images. But I have only seen the flash in conjunction with the invalid keyframe bug on the first slide (which you just made a workaround for). When the invalid keyframe bug occurs, the last frame has a single keyframe with a rectangle of size 0, 0, 0, 0 - which causes the black frame. So I expect the workaround fixes the black flash - unless someone can reproduce the flash on a slide other than the first slide.

I don’t want to derail this thread but I am just going to say this: You asked for feedback and I’m giving you feedback. I spend time testing to find issues and spend some more time typing all that out. It may be lengthy but it’s the feedback I give. You’ve agreed with feedback I’ve given before. Other times you didn’t agree. I don’t know why this time was any different for you. If you don’t like me posting here then say so and I won’t post in this forum anymore.

In any case, here are more notes about this beta:

  • Dragging a clip from outside of Shotcut directly to the timeline does not always produce a clip box. And when it does the size of the clip box is not accurate to the actual size of that clip.

  • Editing programs that allow bringing in clips directly to the timeline usually automatically add the clip to their media bin at the same time. I don’t know if that’s something you are interested in doing in regards to the playlist but I thought I’d mention that.

  • Timeline in Properties does not update if you press the O key to eliminate the right side of a clip in the timeline. It updates right away when you press I though but not with O.

  • The F2 shortcut to rename clips should also open that clip (double click) in the playlist at the same time. The reason is because if you simply highlight a clip in the playlist and press F2 it won’t rename that clip because it only renames the clip in the Source tab. I think most people won’t think to double click a clip in the playlist before pressing F2 to rename that clip.

  • There is a major issue with setting where the proxies are stored. I tested changing the location to an external hard drive which had some media in it already. I made some proxies from videos that were already in that external hard drive’s folder. It also stored proxies in that folder from media that came from outside that hard drive. However, when I clicked to change where the proxies will be stored to a new location, Shotcut froze. Later I realized that Shotcut was trying to copy and paste all of the media including non-proxy files that were in that folder to the new proxy storage location instead of just simply changing the location. So right now, once a storage location for proxies is set, Shotcut will copy everything in that folder to a new location if you try to change where proxies will be stored.

  • Related to the above, I think that the location where proxies are stored should be project specific with the info stored in the mlt project file just like any other normal source file. I remember changing the location of a proxy that I had in that external hard drive but Shotcut didn’t prompt me to tell me that it can’t find that proxy.

It intentionally does not try to show a clip box while dragging. At this point, it does not know how long the clip is. If the user has many clips selected, determining the durations of all of them could take quite a while and interfere with the interactivity of the drag-n-drop interaction. This will not be changed. But it does seem to pick up an old duration when having previously dragged from the playlist, for example. Or, perhaps it is a random duration value. I will look into this.

I will add a progress dialog around this operation. I will also add a question dialog to ask the user if they want to do that.

Please check the aftermath of A(ppending) clips from the file manager (Windows in my case) to the timeline via Source, because after 5 or 6 appends, say, the Select Track drops to the one below, eg V1 to A1.

I thought it was me so I took care with the keyboard until the next occurrence.

About the proxy. Not necessarily a problem, just questions.

I entered a .mkv HEVC 1432x1080 px video with two audio tracks a) 5.1 channel AAC. and b) 2 channel AAC:
The conversion to proxy was done for a 720 px preview setup… The resulting proxy file was larger (787 mb vs 1GB of proxy), can this influence the editing performance?
I noticed that the audio inside the video was converted as well (AC3).
If I include audio sources of considerable size (Wav) to which I want to apply filters, these audio files are not processed to proxy (they are not converted). Is this because audio processing does not consume many resources in Shotcut and the general purpose of the proxy is only for video previewing (not for audio)?

No, because the 720 is less to decode than 1080, 720 matches the preview scale eliminating scaling from source to preview resolution, and the proxy encodes use all intra frames to optimize seek and rewind performance. 720 is quite a high proxy/preview resolution for a 1080 project and not what I recommend. 720p is offered primarily for a 4K. The combination of all intra and your preview scale relative to the source resolution is resulting in a larger file even though a fairly high compression level is used.

Is this because audio processing does not consume many resources in Shotcut and the general purpose of the proxy is only for video previewing (not for audio)?

Yes, there is not exactly a thing like preview scaling for audio. However, preview within Shotcut always uses 48 KHz, but you can set a higher sample rate in the export and all filters scale automatically for this. You can also set audio channels to 2/stereo in settings during preview and editing and then change it to 6 at time of export if you do not use much audio filters that are aware of > 2 channels.

Thank you very much for the answers.
I’ll set the proxy to a lower resolution.
Sometimes, I feel the audio is forgotten by many users.
Thank you again for your work. :+1:

  • You made a change to not automatically make proxies for images with alpha channels. But Shotcut is still making proxies with no alpha channel support for videos with alpha channels. I suggested making proxies for these cases by using the Quicktime Animation preset but at the proxy resolution. I don’t know if you rejected that idea but I am just mentioning this again because it’s still an issue.

  • In the Copy Hash Code option in the Proxy button there is an option for “Copy Link Location” but it can’t be selected. When can you select it?

  • Shotcut unexpectedly closed on me while I had proxy mode on. When I opened it and used the autosave, Shotcut noted that proxy mode was on but it wasn’t actually using the proxies in the timeline. I had to manually switch the proxy mode off then back on for the proxies to actually be used.

  • For the Pitch filter, when you hover the mouse scroll wheel over the actual number values it moves them at the smallest increments. Can it be made to move it at bigger increments?