Suggested usability improvement on the Fade To Black filter

[AlanD]

There is nothing wrong with the filter itself, and the interface caters for all possibilities, but that also makes it a little clunky and sometimes error prone for some common operations.

Clunkiness:

The vast majority of times I use this, I am either fading in from the start, or fading out at the end. The start time is preset to zero, and the end time is preset to the length of the video, so for fading in I have to set the end time to, say, 0,5,0, which just seems a lot of mousing and clicking, and for fading out I am doing a mental calculation on what start time I need to get a certain length of fade out, and then again changing several boxes.

Error Prone:

I've lost count of the number of times I've rendered a long video, only to find that I'd been so focused on setting the times correctly that I completely forgot to change the Fade Type drop down, and instead of fading in the first five seconds, it fades them out instead. In the Active Filters list, it just says Fade To Black, with no indication of which type of fade it is, so once you've made the mistake, it isn't apparent.

Suggestion:

Keep the current fade to black filter as it is, as a sort of "expert mode", because that will cater for all possible situations, but have two additional filters which appear in the list as "Fade In From Start" and "Fade Out At End", where each has only one box on there, that being the duration of the transition in seconds. I feel this would be a much more intutive interface. I am assuming that it would only need a slightly different front end, and that it would feed its parameters into the same bit of code as the current fade to black, so I'm hoping it would be a relatively easy addition for people familiar with the code.

Any thoughts/criticisms?

[eumagga0x2a]

Clunkiness:

The vast majority of times I use this, I am either fading in from the start, or fading out at the end. The start time is preset to zero, and the end time is preset to the length of the video, so for fading in I have to set the end time to, say, 0,5,0, which just seems a lot of mousing and clicking, and for fading out I am doing a mental calculation on what start time I need to get a certain length of fade out, and then again changing several boxes.

It is much less of a hassle when using keyboard instead of mouse to navigate between spinboxes. With a dialog UI built directly with Qt instead of using Avidemux own easy to use but quite limited abstraction layer (remember, Avidemux had also a very nice GTK frontend back then), it would have been possible to connect the type (in/out) to other input elements and labels and so match a more natural mental model of start point and transition duration for fade in and end point and transition duration for fade out.

Error Prone:

I've lost count of the number of times I've rendered a long video, only to find that I'd been so focused on setting the times correctly that I completely forgot to change the Fade Type drop down, and instead of fading in the first five seconds, it fades them out instead. In the Active Filters list, it just says Fade To Black, with no indication of which type of fade it is, so once you've made the mistake, it isn't apparent.

Fixed by [fadeToBlack] Add fade direction to human-readable filter configuration displayed in the list of active filters, thanks.

Suggestion:

Keep the current fade to black filter as it is, as a sort of "expert mode", because that will cater for all possible situations, but have two additional filters which appear in the list as "Fade In From Start" and "Fade Out At End", where each has only one box on there, that being the duration of the transition in seconds. I feel this would be a much more intutive interface. I am assuming that it would only need a slightly different front end, and that it would feed its parameters into the same bit of code as the current fade to black, so I'm hoping it would be a relatively easy addition for people familiar with the code.

Any thoughts/criticisms?

A growing list of filters? "Fade to black" is already a spin-off of the "Fade to" filter (or the other way round). The issues raised are valid, of course, but sort of very minor IMVHO... Maybe a purposely-built Qt interface one day, but very unsure.

[AlanD]

I agree the proliferation of filters is undesirable. A problem I find with many of the video editors is the sheer number of plugins and filters with obscure names. I am sure the writers see this as a selling point to people who haven't used editors much, but scrolling through a long list of filters with cryptic icons trying to find the few that are used regularly is also very clunky. In AVIdemux, the addition of the fade direction to the description of the filter config is probably more than enough to eliminate that particular usability issue. Thank you for making that addition.