Sequencer Panels Update

The Properties panel certainly is not the most polished in the Blender UI. It can get really big with all its options. An overall redesign could bring some vertical space back and improve usability. It can also provide something important to the user experience: consistency .

So I collected simple ideas in the the last years and tried to work them together to create a more polished UI for the VSE.

Try Yourself

The images used in this article are actual screencaps. The file space_sequencer.py holds the UI for Sequencer and I already did the scripting job. You can try the most of them right now by loading and running this script in a Blender text editor window.

Panels redesign

The Type button is always disabled in Strip Edit panel, being useless as an interaction element. It would be more appropriate to display it as part of the strip Info.

The Edit Strip panel may get the Trim options from Input panel, which seems to relate most with the Start and Length frame options, creating an unified UI for strip time control.

The info about Original Dimension displayed in Edit Strip panel seems not to be related with the strip itself, but the strip's input. It could be placed right below the input path, indicating the correct input loading. It should not be displayed for Sound, Color, Blend and Effect strips as it happens currently.

The Info text box could be improved by displaying more valuable info and present its values in seconds (SMPTE). Such specific info may not be useful all time, so moving it to its own panel so it can be collapsed. It can help to clean up the UI, still opening the possibility to add in the future other Info entries without prejudice.

The Image Offset and Image Crop options may use much less space. The Flip options from Filters panel seems to be most related to this context.

Sound strips

The Volume property of Sound strips seems to behave like the Opacity property for audio, so it should be moved to the Edit Strip panel and replace the Opacity. The Pan and Pitch properties can be placed here to keep the main audio configs together.

The Pack button need to keep consistency with another occurrences in the UI.

Transform Effect strip

In the Transform Effect strip panel, the Position and Scale options may use less space, and the Translation Unit can be expanded.

The Input field may be improved by showing a strip list to select, like in other areas of blender. This operation is currently only available by the Reassign operation, but this functionality is already in the Mask field of any modifier. There is nothing new to implement this idea.

There's a loop problem that is allowing to select the own strip as an input, which causes Blender to crash. Mask field has a build in function to prevent this, and in order to implement this feature it would be necessary to make the same to input fields. By the way, Mask's function isn't perfect, it allows Sound strip to be selected as a Mask.

The user experience of the Uniform Scale option can be improved. The current behavior is just to replace the "X" label by "Scale" and hide the Y field, what may induce the user to think this (Scale) is different property, i.e. that can be animated separately. By simply disabling the Y option, we can give correct visual feedback.

Multicam Effect

To improve the workflow using multicam strips, buttons to skip to the Previous and Next cut could be added aside the Play button. This functionality is already provide by the Jump To Cut addon, but could be integrated to give a better user experience.

Another issue is that the Cut To buttons don't deal very well with big values. But it can be easily fixed limiting its amount per row.

Add Effect

The Add Effect and other Blend effects could have buttons to Swap and Reassign inputs. The Fader option could be present in all of them.

The button Type could be useful to quickly change effect the type, the same way the Change Effect Type operation (menu Strip > Change > Change Effect Type). This way an Add effect could become a Multiply effect easily.

The input fields can behave like discussed in the Transform Effect, showing a list of strips to select.

Scene Strip

The Volume option should go Strip panel to be consistent with the Sound strip panel.

Speed Effect

Learning how to use the Speed Effect was a big challenge to me, mainly because its UI. Click the only visible checkbox, then another checkbox popups. Click the second, then another one! The fields name and position keep changing... How is it suppose to work?

To redesign the Speed Effect UI the approach was to keep it stable. Instead of hiding and showing elements, let's keep them inactive until the user interacts. The first field needs to be the most important one, the Speed.

The enabled Auto button means the Effect will take care of the Speed value.

Let's disable Auto, now the Speed field becomes editable and Use as speed is available.

If you disable, by curiosity, the Use as speed , the Speed value turns into Frame . The Use as scale becomes available.

Let's check Use as scale , now the Frame field become Scale. Pretty clear, is it not?

Did you notice the Use as speed option becomes inactive? It's because the two Use options are mutual exclusive, they don't work together.

The old UI don't prevent you of to enable Use as speed again, creating an inconsistency in the strip data. It also induces the user to think the Use as scale option depends on Use as speed being enabled. It doesn't. The proposed UI addresses this issue.

Another improvements

There's a lot to talk about it, but I'll left some images instead.

Text strip:

Proxy:

Proxy with "Use Custom File":

Modifier Color Balance:

Thank you for reading it, please like it if you like any of these ideas, and be free to discuss them.