VideoMeld issues & feedback
Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2014 8:22 am
Hi Chris,
For the past two years, I've been producing a video every week using Multiquence, I so actually had to hold back on system upgrades because Multiquence didn't work on newer OSes. But now, after having waited a few more months for VideoMeld to mature, I finally bit the bullet and recently performer the upgrade: Windows XP to Windows 8 and Multiquence to VideoMeld. And I survived .
...But not quite intact. I have to say, there's a lot of nice new ideas about VideoMeld compared to Multiquence - and of course, just the fact that it works in Win 8, and the fact that it's still so incredibly cheap compared to so many other, actually inferior packages, these are great things. Be that as it may, in many small ways, VideoMeld has become less convenient to use than Multiquence. These may be issues related to me being so used to the Multiquence way of doing things, and maybe in a few months I'll get used to it, but in the meantime, the amount of time it takes to do various things in VideoMeld is much longer than Multiquence.
So, here's what's probably going to be the first of many change request lists from me. I don't know how much time you have for VideoMeld development, I know that GoldWave is still your main priority, but I hope you can get some of these done quickly...
- It is not possible to manually adjust the volume and exact timing of a point on the fade graph by right-clicking it and entering the numbers. It's nice that when I drag the point around with a mouse, I see the numeric info on the volume and timing, because it means that I can still get things exactly how I wanted - but boy, it takes way longer to set things up when dragging around and trying to be precise.
- When adjusting the fade graph, we only see the timing info relative to the whole length of the project. It used to be in Multiquence that only the timing relative to the currect section was displayed. Displaying both would be nice, but if I had to choose just one, I'd definitely go the Multiquence way. The thing is, most of the time when you edit the fade graph, you're adjusting visually, without looking at the numbers. But on the rare occasions when the numbers actually become important - it is the section positions that matter, not the positions within the entire project.
- The preview window has become so sloooow! I can never rely on it any more to actually preview the changes I make, because it often pauses for half a second when it reaches any kind of effect, crossfade, anything like that. I'm experienced enough now that I trust myself to get everything set up right without constantly relying on the preview, but when you do need a preview... well, you just don't have one. And this is not a slow machine, by the way - and I'm not working with some extremely high resolution, just 1280x720. I think that simply the minimum resolution of the preview window is still too high - if I had the option of watching on less than 270p, even as low as 100p, I would be happy just as long as the video was displaying smoothly with all the effects in the right places.
- An alternative option, and this is obviously a new feature, would be to have a preview render-to-video option, where you don't render the entire project, but instead only the segment that interests you. Usually, when you're previewing a change, you only need to preview 10-20 seconds of the video. Rendering that amount of data would be pretty fast, but at the moment there simply isn't such an option.
- The new way in which zoom/pan effects are handled is terrible. The concept is good, the implementation is evil. I used to have tons of static images in my videos, which I would animate by zooming on parts of them, panning across them, and so on. The way the new implementation of these effects is set up, it's theoretically incredibly powerful. Instead of having a starting point and an ending point, you can have multiple points, you can zoom in a little bit, then pan, then turn and pan in a different direction, it's great. But it doesn't work properly! When you first create a zoom effect, there are no points on the graph... and when you right-click to create points on the graph, nothing happens. The only way I've so far been able to create points on the effect graph is to select one of the preset settings, because then appropriate points are inserted automatically, and once the points are there, more points can be created and moved at will. So, there seem to be a bug with creating points initially. The other thing is that once you do have points on the graph, you cannot select all four coordinates at once (at least, I couldn't figure it out). You have to adjust the top, bottom, left and right separately, and sometimes when you change one, the others, including the ones you'd already set up, adjust automatically. What I would like is to simply be able to click on any time within the span of the effect, and then adjust all four points together by moving the frame on the preview image. And that would be awesome, then you'd have a huge upgrade compared to Multiquence.
- Another small issue is that with Multiquence, it was possible to drag-and-drop from Windows Explorer (or any other program displaying files in a window) straight to a track in Multiquence. This no longer works - at least here, on Windows 8. Each time I want to add something, I have to click on the track, then I click on the video/audio/image button, then I must go through the folders to find the file I need. That's a lot of additional time wasted.
- One other small thing that causes me an unproportional amount of grief, is that in Multiquence, you could select a track by clicking on an empty section of the track. In VideoMeld, you can only select a track by clicking near its name on the left side of the screen. I suppose that anyone who starts off with VideoMeld will not have trouble getting used to this, but me, having used Multiquence for so long, I keep messing things up because I thought I'd selected a different track, but I didn't.
Well, that's all for now, except to add that like 2leftfeet mentioned in the "transferring projects" thread, I also really could use the ability to move projects to another folder and still have them work. It was brilliant with Multiquence.
...And speaking of which. I suppose this is the least priority, but a Multiquence-to-VideoMeld project converter is, in many ways, indispensable. I have two years' worth of Multiquence project archives, and in the past few months, I have on occasion pulled out an older video, made a couple of changes and republished it as a rerun. I've not needed to do that so far, since switching to VideoMeld - but if I needed to, I simply would not have that option. My whole archive of older projects is effectively useless, because Multiquence no longer works, and VideoMeld doesn't read them.
Oh, and by the way - it's still a really great package in spite of all the little problems. A year and a half ago, when I realised I would have to abandon Multiquence to finally upgrade my OS, and when VideoMeld was still nowhere to be seen, I did a lot of research looking at other video editing packages in this price range. There is nothing there that compares even remotely to VideoMeld and Multiquence!
For the past two years, I've been producing a video every week using Multiquence, I so actually had to hold back on system upgrades because Multiquence didn't work on newer OSes. But now, after having waited a few more months for VideoMeld to mature, I finally bit the bullet and recently performer the upgrade: Windows XP to Windows 8 and Multiquence to VideoMeld. And I survived .
...But not quite intact. I have to say, there's a lot of nice new ideas about VideoMeld compared to Multiquence - and of course, just the fact that it works in Win 8, and the fact that it's still so incredibly cheap compared to so many other, actually inferior packages, these are great things. Be that as it may, in many small ways, VideoMeld has become less convenient to use than Multiquence. These may be issues related to me being so used to the Multiquence way of doing things, and maybe in a few months I'll get used to it, but in the meantime, the amount of time it takes to do various things in VideoMeld is much longer than Multiquence.
So, here's what's probably going to be the first of many change request lists from me. I don't know how much time you have for VideoMeld development, I know that GoldWave is still your main priority, but I hope you can get some of these done quickly...
- It is not possible to manually adjust the volume and exact timing of a point on the fade graph by right-clicking it and entering the numbers. It's nice that when I drag the point around with a mouse, I see the numeric info on the volume and timing, because it means that I can still get things exactly how I wanted - but boy, it takes way longer to set things up when dragging around and trying to be precise.
- When adjusting the fade graph, we only see the timing info relative to the whole length of the project. It used to be in Multiquence that only the timing relative to the currect section was displayed. Displaying both would be nice, but if I had to choose just one, I'd definitely go the Multiquence way. The thing is, most of the time when you edit the fade graph, you're adjusting visually, without looking at the numbers. But on the rare occasions when the numbers actually become important - it is the section positions that matter, not the positions within the entire project.
- The preview window has become so sloooow! I can never rely on it any more to actually preview the changes I make, because it often pauses for half a second when it reaches any kind of effect, crossfade, anything like that. I'm experienced enough now that I trust myself to get everything set up right without constantly relying on the preview, but when you do need a preview... well, you just don't have one. And this is not a slow machine, by the way - and I'm not working with some extremely high resolution, just 1280x720. I think that simply the minimum resolution of the preview window is still too high - if I had the option of watching on less than 270p, even as low as 100p, I would be happy just as long as the video was displaying smoothly with all the effects in the right places.
- An alternative option, and this is obviously a new feature, would be to have a preview render-to-video option, where you don't render the entire project, but instead only the segment that interests you. Usually, when you're previewing a change, you only need to preview 10-20 seconds of the video. Rendering that amount of data would be pretty fast, but at the moment there simply isn't such an option.
- The new way in which zoom/pan effects are handled is terrible. The concept is good, the implementation is evil. I used to have tons of static images in my videos, which I would animate by zooming on parts of them, panning across them, and so on. The way the new implementation of these effects is set up, it's theoretically incredibly powerful. Instead of having a starting point and an ending point, you can have multiple points, you can zoom in a little bit, then pan, then turn and pan in a different direction, it's great. But it doesn't work properly! When you first create a zoom effect, there are no points on the graph... and when you right-click to create points on the graph, nothing happens. The only way I've so far been able to create points on the effect graph is to select one of the preset settings, because then appropriate points are inserted automatically, and once the points are there, more points can be created and moved at will. So, there seem to be a bug with creating points initially. The other thing is that once you do have points on the graph, you cannot select all four coordinates at once (at least, I couldn't figure it out). You have to adjust the top, bottom, left and right separately, and sometimes when you change one, the others, including the ones you'd already set up, adjust automatically. What I would like is to simply be able to click on any time within the span of the effect, and then adjust all four points together by moving the frame on the preview image. And that would be awesome, then you'd have a huge upgrade compared to Multiquence.
- Another small issue is that with Multiquence, it was possible to drag-and-drop from Windows Explorer (or any other program displaying files in a window) straight to a track in Multiquence. This no longer works - at least here, on Windows 8. Each time I want to add something, I have to click on the track, then I click on the video/audio/image button, then I must go through the folders to find the file I need. That's a lot of additional time wasted.
- One other small thing that causes me an unproportional amount of grief, is that in Multiquence, you could select a track by clicking on an empty section of the track. In VideoMeld, you can only select a track by clicking near its name on the left side of the screen. I suppose that anyone who starts off with VideoMeld will not have trouble getting used to this, but me, having used Multiquence for so long, I keep messing things up because I thought I'd selected a different track, but I didn't.
Well, that's all for now, except to add that like 2leftfeet mentioned in the "transferring projects" thread, I also really could use the ability to move projects to another folder and still have them work. It was brilliant with Multiquence.
...And speaking of which. I suppose this is the least priority, but a Multiquence-to-VideoMeld project converter is, in many ways, indispensable. I have two years' worth of Multiquence project archives, and in the past few months, I have on occasion pulled out an older video, made a couple of changes and republished it as a rerun. I've not needed to do that so far, since switching to VideoMeld - but if I needed to, I simply would not have that option. My whole archive of older projects is effectively useless, because Multiquence no longer works, and VideoMeld doesn't read them.
Oh, and by the way - it's still a really great package in spite of all the little problems. A year and a half ago, when I realised I would have to abandon Multiquence to finally upgrade my OS, and when VideoMeld was still nowhere to be seen, I did a lot of research looking at other video editing packages in this price range. There is nothing there that compares even remotely to VideoMeld and Multiquence!