[Kdenlive-devel] Timeline layout discussion?

[reinhard]

Hi,

personally I'm not feeling 100% comfortable with the timeline layout.

Let me give an example of what I mean:

When I actually start a new movie, using the default layout settings
when creating a new project == 3 video and 2 audio tracks, I'm intended
to place the first clip into the nearest possible track, which is track
0 in this case.
Now I want to fade over to another scene, so I place a clip into the
track below and apply a luma transition.

Now PROBLEM #1 comes up, because the transition has wrong default
direction, in this case, and I have to manually change the direction of
the transition.

Ok, going on doing some more edits.....

Later in the process I need to add an PIP (Picture In Picture) to the
first clip in track 0, which leads to PROBLEM #2, because actually it's
not possible to add a new track above track 0.
So, I've tried to add the PIP clip below of track 0 and tried the
composite transition for this purpose, but I failed. But maybe I did
something wrong here?

However, back to PROBLEM #2:
So, what when we finally can add new tracks to the timeline and I need
to add a track above track 0, how is it named? Track -1 ? Or will the
other  track numbers increased by 1, so primary track 0 becomes track 1,
and so on...?

None of this seems to be a good solution to me....IMHO!

So why not change the numbering of the A/V tracks to some of this
layouts and separate the audio-only tracks?

LAYOUT #1
Audio/Video tracks 
...
3
2
1
0
---------------------- (Separator to audio-only tracks)
...
3
2
1
0

LAYOUT #2

Audio/Video tracks 
...
3
2
1
0
---------------------- (Separator to audio-only tracks)
0
1
2
...

The advantage of the new A/V layout may be that it hopefully/maybe solve
both problems, because user should normally put the first clip
intentionally/automatically into A/V track 0 ;)
Also this seems to be a very common layout of most video editing
applications, so new users might feel very familiar.

Ok, just my 2 cent...

greetings
reinhard