OK, there’s a new “feature” in Cortex 2.0 that’s driving our operators crazy. Cortex now remembers the playback position of each clip. For example, you’re playing Clip 1 and leave the playhead in the middle of the clip. Now you click on Clip 2 and start playing, logging, whatever. Now if you click back on Clip 1, the playhead is in the middle of the clip.
This behavior is very similar to what Avid Media Composer does with clips. And it makes total sense to have this feature IF YOU’RE EDITING. You want to stop a clip, compare different angles, go back to the same clip, same position as before.
BUT IT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE FOR DAILIES. Processing dailies is quite a different animal than editing. With dailies the operators need to log and check hundreds of clips very quickly. The most important info is near the IN point (director calls ‘roll cam/sound’, slate clap with info and sync, director calls ‘action’). Then we check the middle of the clip, make sure all is ok and in sync, then mark the OUT point at the end. Later, when the operators are double checking everything, they go to each slate clap to make sure all is logged/marked/synched correctly.
In version 1.5.4 when you clicked on a clip it automatically brought you to the IN point which was idea for dailies. But now with 2.0.3 it jumps to the last played position (normally the OUT point). So now the operators have to jump back to the IN point to double check the clip. This may seem simple, but it adds to the keystrokes they have to type and compounds the frustration.
Here’s my request: in the lower left of the Cortex app there’s a popup menu for the ‘feature set’ of Dailies. Current options are ‘ALL’, “DAILIES” or “EDITORIAL”. My request is if the “DAILIES” option is selected, then clips act like they did in 1.5.4 (jump back to IN point when selecting a clip). But if the EDITORIAL or ALL options are selected, it can use the current behavior of remembering the playback position.
Or maybe just a simple preference somewhere with a checkbox or popup menu for “Clip behavior” with options like “Jump to IN point” and “Remember last played position”
Sure. We can probably do something to modify the behavior. It would be best to have it saved in your preferences, but since we don’t really have anywhere in the UI to set something like that it would be a bigger change. I’ll talk to others here to get their feeling about what makes the most sense. It could be dependent on the workspace selection (ALL, DAILIES, or EDITORIAL) or we could have it only work that way in the Edit tool.
We will have a fix for this in our next release. It will “Jump to IN point” if you have the DAILIES workspace loaded. In the ALL and EDITORIAL workspaces, it will “Remember last played position”.
When we have a preferences page, it will be an option. For now it will be controlled based on what workspace is selected. The workspace selection is the drop down in the bottom left corner of Cortex next to the tool tabs. It will work as I previously described.
We had a chance to road test the new “jump to in-point” function of the dailies workspace. I’d say we are about 50% there. When we load our picture and sound into Cortex we remove the native sound if any then use the Auto Sync Function (sometimes with or without an offset). At this point if we browse through our clips via keystroke or mouse we can see that the clip will jump to the in-point created by Cortex. In our case it will be one second before the slate clap as we use the auto-trim function. This is great and we applaud your team for it’s speedy response to this request. The only issue we are see-ing is that if we need to scrub through the clip for any reason (mostly to set our out-point) or need to adjust sync using a bit of action (say a closing car door), when we return to the clip at the very end of our logging process to do our double check the playhead will still be at the most recent timecode. What we are hoping to have is anytime we move from a clip to the next and then jump back to a previously logged clip it will always move the playhead to the in-point created via the auto trim. I’ve suggested to our operators to use the Shift+I keystroke when selecting a clip or Shift+R/E when move chronologically through the clip list or at the very least the HOME key but we’d like to have all options available to us as this new feature has disrupted some of the workflow tricks our operators use for max efficiency. As always thank you for the support and we look forward to a preference panel or dialogue box.
We are using build 8050. Sorry I was under the impression that this was the “new” build with these settings. OK we look forward to the next build and I apologize for any confusion at the office and on the forums.