P. Short
11-28-2007, 10:05 PM
While trying to sleep at night I came up with an idea for a sequence editor that I think might be easier for some people to use that than the current cell-based editor.
Instead of having a fixed-width (shaded) cell on the screen as the basic unit, I think that I would like to see tiles. Each tile is one channel in height by a variable time duration in length. The tile could represent a time period as short as one cell does now, or it could extend the entire duration of a sequence. The interior of the tile on the PC screen would have a waveform depicting what is going on (a ramp-off tile would have a diagonal line top-left to bottom-right, a partial ramp-on would have a diagonal line from points on the sides representative of the start- and stop- levels, a full bright would have a horizontal line on the top of the tile, and so forth). These tiles could be slid right and left, expanded and contracted, deleted, created, inserted, copied and pasted, and so forth with the mouse and the keyboard.
This has some similarities to the scheme that I was discussing almost two years ago in that it displays representative waveforms. The biggest difference from that scheme is the idea of breaking the waveform up into tiles that can be individually manipulated. I think that this new editor should co-exist with the current sequence editor, rather than replacing it. This new editor implies changes to the .vix file format, so that the tile information can be saved (along side the derived array of event data).
Right now I'm working on a little dhtml demo of what I have in mind. This will take a few days, or so, since I'm a definite neophyte at javascript and css.
Thoughts? This would obviously not be a short-term project.
Phil
Instead of having a fixed-width (shaded) cell on the screen as the basic unit, I think that I would like to see tiles. Each tile is one channel in height by a variable time duration in length. The tile could represent a time period as short as one cell does now, or it could extend the entire duration of a sequence. The interior of the tile on the PC screen would have a waveform depicting what is going on (a ramp-off tile would have a diagonal line top-left to bottom-right, a partial ramp-on would have a diagonal line from points on the sides representative of the start- and stop- levels, a full bright would have a horizontal line on the top of the tile, and so forth). These tiles could be slid right and left, expanded and contracted, deleted, created, inserted, copied and pasted, and so forth with the mouse and the keyboard.
This has some similarities to the scheme that I was discussing almost two years ago in that it displays representative waveforms. The biggest difference from that scheme is the idea of breaking the waveform up into tiles that can be individually manipulated. I think that this new editor should co-exist with the current sequence editor, rather than replacing it. This new editor implies changes to the .vix file format, so that the tile information can be saved (along side the derived array of event data).
Right now I'm working on a little dhtml demo of what I have in mind. This will take a few days, or so, since I'm a definite neophyte at javascript and css.
Thoughts? This would obviously not be a short-term project.
Phil