Posted: 20/11/2015
This last blog post in our series of editing time wasters looks at the remaining items on our original list. I’m not just going to focus on why saving a video project is an editing time waster, but also look at the lack of macros, menus and layouts, and online support forums.
Now, one of the things I really dislike is when you’re editing a sequence, the programme crashes and you lose everything you’ve done in the last 10 minutes. Sometimes that’s not very much, but other times that can be a lot of work. If you’re lucky, the auto-save recovered some of the work, but seeing as that annoying little pop-up box only appears intermittently, chances are you’ve lost 10 minutes of work. It can be very frustrating. Luckily, when editing in Forscene, the professional video editing software continues to save your work every minute. And if you accidently exit the programme, the next time you launch Forscene, you can go to ‘previously saved versions’ (it’s the little recovery truck in the left side panel!) and load the last auto-saved version of the sequence.
In my overview blog post on editing time wasters, I was irritated by macros, or rather the lack of being able to create your own. Keyboard shortcuts are a feature of Forscene that are really very useful. Not only can you set keys to do any function that suits you, there are also pre-defined keyboard shortcuts that mirror functions in other well-known NLEs. Then there are macros, where you can set one key (or a combination of keys) to do multiple functions. In Forscene, you can add to existing keyboard shortcut lists or set up your own from scratch, and they will be saved in your account for use on different projects.
The next two time wasters I’m going to look at are menus and structured layouts. Trawling through menus and sub-menus, looking for specific transitions or effects that aren’t in your favourites’ is maddening. It’s great that many different effects are supported, but really, how many do you use? Structured layouts are another one that gets me down. Yes, you can set-up different workspaces for different projects, depending on whether you’re editing or reviewing, etc, but sometimes you just want to be able to move the timeline a few inches towards the top of the screen to save you from getting neck ache after an entire day of editing. Forscene allows you to move all windows within the application around freely – so they can be neatly lined up or overlapping each other!
I’m just going to touch on the last point briefly, as I covered it quite well in the overview blog: online support forums. The likes of Creative Cow are very useful, as they answer all queries on a range of video editing topics. Yet sometimes you just want to be able to quickly ask someone for help on how to use a function and not wait an hour for a reply. I see it as a time waster because it slows you down and could be a barrier for you being able to continue with editing a project. Forscene on the other hand has support teams available in the chat window to answer your questions in real-time, the ability to chat with other people in your project in a private chat window, as well as everyone working in Forscene in other accounts in the public chat window.
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Jon Hanford - Group CTO, Deltatre