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.
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?
Copy hash code is automatically copied. The dialog appears so you can also see it without pasting somewhere.
I am only reproducing that with vp8 or vp9 because it was disguising its alpha channel (not indicated in pix_fmt). This is fixed now. What format you experiencing it with and what does it report for Properties > Video > Format?
That is a builtin option to the canned dialog function. It is for when the text has a hyperlink, which it does not, so it is disabled. I do not have direct control over this and cannot be removed.
It is not possible to increase it for both numeric fields due to the way they update each other in an non-linear fashion. So, I added it to Octave Shift to correspond with a half step size - 12 half steps in an octave.
Worse than that, it does not recover the auto-saved file in proxy mode thereby losing work. This is fixed.
I brought in audios files that had flac, mp3 and m4a file extensions with proxy mode on and Shotcut tried to make proxies out of them which ended up with failures in the jobs list.
When Copy Hash Code is selected there is a sound that comes up when the dialog box appears. Can that sound be muted?
When you bring in a video through the player and not the playlist it won’t actually set the video mode for the project. So if you save the project with only one video in the player and not have it in playlist when you reopen it the project’s video mode will be set to the default 1080p 25fps no matter what the resolution and fps of that video file was.
I took a video in the playlist and disabled proxy. I then took a section of that video and dragged it to the timeline. On that section I enabled proxy and made the proxy. The proxy that was generated was of the whole video. When I turned the proxy mode on for that section, it still noted that the proxy mode was disabled on the whole video in the playlist even though the proxy that was made was for the whole video. In this case, shouldn’t disabling or enabling proxies to clips from the same source file affect the selection made to all clips from that source since the proxy that will be generated will be of the whole video regardless?
Cover art is a valid video stream and not so easily detected as something special. Then, if you use 360p, much cover art dimension is > 1.3x360=468. I will add a rule that says nothing over 999 fps.
When Copy Hash Code is selected there is a sound that comes up when the dialog box appears. Can that sound be muted?
No
When you bring in a video through the player and not the playlist it won’t actually set the video mode for the project.
I assume you are starting with Video Mode = Automatic. With automatic, it is by design for a clip-only project that the video mode is not established until you save.
So if you save the project with only one video in the player and not have it in playlist when you reopen it the project’s video mode will be set to the default 1080p 25fps no matter what the resolution and fps of that video file was.
I do not reproduce this.
shouldn’t disabling or enabling proxies to clips from the same source file affect the selection made to all clips from that source since the proxy that will be generated will be of the whole video regardless?
Disabling affects all clips currently, but not re-enabling. Re-enabling only affects the status of the selected clip object and does not even try to replace it with a proxy if one exists. Currently, if you want to re-enable proxy for a source, you need to choose which clip objects to re-enable and either reload the project (if you know a proxy exists) or choose Make Proxy. This will not be changed for the release but perhaps improved upon later. Currently, the disable option is designed as a blocking maneuver and not as a source level toggle for the whole project.
Take a video that has a resolution and fps that are different than 1080p 25fps (e.g. 720p 30fps, 4K 23.98) and drag it directly to the player not to the playlist or timeline.
Save it as an mlt project file.
Close Shotcut.
Open that very mlt project file that was just saved.
When you go the the Export menu the resolution and fps will be set at 1080p 25fps.
I see. Maybe it’s better to keep it the way it is to not complicate the code. I first thought that disabling proxy was about just about generation of proxies but now I see it’s about deactivating the use of the proxy whether or not there is a proxy that has been made. So maybe there are some use cases for someone to only want a section to be proxy and the other not in one project.
I tested this fix with the alpha channel vp9 preset (Format yuv420p) in the Export menu and it’s still making proxies with no alpha channel support for vp9. Did you reproduce the issue with the alpha presets for QuickTime and Ut Video?
Hello again:
I set it to Proxy-adjustment-storage. I set a different folder for storing proxy files than the default one (I called it Orphans Proxy) so that all proxy files generated without a saved project are stored there.
Then I opened SC (without assigning a project) and dragged a video into the playlist. SC created a proxy file of the video and since there is no associated project it saved that file to the “Orphans Proxy” folder. So far so good.
I then deleted the file from the playlist and closed SC without saving the project. The proxy file remains in the folder I created. Shouldn’t this proxy file be deleted automatically or a dialog appears asking what to do with the generated proxy files?
My problem with my previous SSD was a small size and that it quickly filled up with the default installations to C: of many programs and the creation of hidden folders. The default folder for proxy storage without a project is in one of those hidden C folders: (unless the user chooses another folder more convenient for him)
Is there a way to delete the proxy file from SC, in these cases where there is no project saved?
With my current setting, I can manually delete the proxy files in the custom folder and I can also take the precaution of creating a project and saving it to do things correctly, but SC now allows edits without a project, so this situation can often occur.
I don’t know if this is a pre-beta problem because I’ve never tried 5.1 channel audio before.
If this is a known behavior, please ignore my comment.
I have a video with 5.1 channel audio. I want to export only the audio so I had several behaviors in SC with export failures.
Exports were correct for AAC, ALAC, FLAC, and WAV formats. Exports failed for MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and WMA.
I thought (mistakenly) that perhaps exporting in these formats (e.g. mp3) would produce several separate files for each channel.
The idea was to export the audio channels in separate files to import them into individual audio tracks in SC so that the sound could be edited.
Since they are default presets (and SC detect the project settings because it automatically selects 6-channel or 2-channel audio according to the audio channel preference setting), maybe in these cases, a conflict warning ( or suggest changing the setting to 2-channel audio) in the export would be possible? (just a thought)
If this behavior occurs before this Beta, please feel free to move this post to the thread you feel is appropriate.
Is there a way to delete the proxy file from SC, in these cases where there is no project saved?
If you are previewing files to determine which ones to include drag to the Source player instead of Playlist. Opening a file in Source does not automatically generate a proxy.
If you want to delete proxies that will no longer be used, it will not be easy. You can open the file, and if you are not on Windows there is an option in Properties > Proxy to Delete Proxy. On Windows, you need to use Copy Hash Code, and then locate the file to delete.
Yes, I can foresee a lot of disk space used with proxies. No, I do not have a good solution for that outside of using project folders. I am thinking about something for the next version. In the meantime, most file managers have a way to add a column that shows Date Accessed. You can add that, click the column heading to sort it, and then delete anything that has not been used since a date.
These formats do not support more than 2 channels.
a conflict warning ( or suggest changing the setting to 2-channel audio) in the export would be possible?
I have stated this often: there are a lot of things that export can check and give a warning. We can write a very large amount of code in this area that is boring work, adds bugs, and makes it much more difficult to maintain while getting little else done. I chose not and to spend time elsewhere. You can look in the job log when it fails and try to learn why. This is outside the scope of this beta.
