Clips moving to wrong layer

[jrxc]

Hi everyone. I'm using the latest version of Arena. When I switch decks, create a layer, then switch back to the first deck, my clips have shifted to the wrong layer. I made a video showing this. Any ideas?

phpBB [video]

[Zoltán]

Your clips in Deck 1 are still in layer 1, and 2 but I see how you could expect these to move with the layers.

Layers are quite independent from the decks.
Decks are just a collection of your clips in rows and columns.
Creating a new layer will only affect the clip layout of your current deck, other deck clips are not affected.
I think this is the behavior you see.

Keeping the decks independent from layers allows you to load decks from other compositions into your current composition. Unfortunately, this comes with the downside of layer changes only affecting the current deck.

[jrxc]

If decks are truly independent, then creating a layer in Deck 2 shouldn’t create a layer at all in Deck 1. Although the main problem is that it is creating a layer in Deck 1 in a different spot than in Deck 2.

[Zoltán]

Layers are part of your composition,
When you create a new layer and load a deck that has fewer rows of clips, the upper layers will be filled with empty clip slots.
Then you can move your clips to these empty layers if you want.

[jrxc]

Yeah that’s the problem. If I have a lot of clips then I have to move every clip every time I create a layer. Seems like that issue should be fixed. If I create a layer in Deck 2 in position 2 (2nd from the top), then a layer should be created in Deck 1 in position 2 (2nd from the top), NOT in position 1 (top).

[Zoltán]

As I tried to explain, this is not something that is broken.

If we'd follow layer creation and move in inactive decks, would you also expect following layer removals?
So you'd create a new layer in deck 1, move layer to bottom, and remove top layer.
This would then also remove the top layer's clips in deck 2?

[Joris]

This is not such a crazy thing to expect.

Let's say I have layer 2 set to mask mode, and a couple of decks with differently themed content. In every deck, the content in layer 2 is then specifically selected by me to be used for masking.

If I then decide that the masking is too much for this show, I can logically expect that removing layer 2, removes all the masking content in every deck. I don't need masking, so why would I still need the masking content?

You say decks and layers are seperate, but because of the Own Layer target, content can become linked to the layer it is in. It is very common to organise content with the same 'purpose' to be triggered into the same layer, which is set up to fit that purpose. And this carries over across decks. Masking even goes so far to change the view of the content in a masked layer.

I understand that you're not touching decks that aren't visible to prevent people losing content, especially because it happens without them actually seeing what has happened. And it's probably the safer choice. But what jrxc is saying is not crazy and I can understand why he thinks it's broken.

[jrxc]

Maybe it can be an option in the settings? Select between two different behaviors.

[hepi.yellow]

Hi,

I think jrxc and Joris are RIGHT!

For the sake of this discussion, let's define an new feature:
Clip Pools (aka "Pool")

• Generic Container: A pool is a generic container of clips.

• Target Layer: A pool can be assigned a Target Layer. When a clip from the pool is triggered, it will be played on the Target Layer.

• Layer Removal: If a Layer is removed, then a Pool that had the removed Layer as it's target layer, would now become target: none. But the pool will still exist.

• Layer Reordering: reordering layers has no affect on the Pool.

• UI - Separate Window: A pool can be displayed in a separate window. It has arbitrary columns and rows. It has pages.
  (Yes! We could finally efficiently use an external touch monitor for triggering clips)

• UI - Drag & Drop: A Clip can be dragged from a pool and dropped in any arbitrary Layer.
  For example, a clip of a shape, can be used as a shape to be disaplyed or as a mask in a Mask-Layer.

The current Clip Pools
Now, if we look at the behaviour of Arena now, a Layer's clip row, could be our Pool, and the decks could be pages of the pool.
For example, if we have 2 layers, Layer-1 and Layer2.
and 2 Pools assigned to Layer-1 and Layer-2 respectively.
Then switching to Deck-2, show us page-2 of Pool-1 and Pool-2.
Apart from the "broken" behaviour described in this discussion, we have our Pool feature.


My brain stopped working
Zoltan, how do you suggest we continue this discussion?
I think it's a rather serious one for Resolume.

[Zoltán]

Clip Pools (aka "Pool")

What you say as Pool-Generic Container is currently the folders of files on disk.
Assigning clips to a layer is placing them in to the deck's clip grid from the folders on disk.
Layer Removal still keeps the files on the disk
Layer Reordering has no effect on the files on disk (pool)
UI - Separate Window = files panel
UI - Drag & Drop = dropping files to the clip grid from Files panel.

Sounds like adding an option to preferences, to have other decks follow layer actions could do what you'd like.

Made a ticket to discuss this.