A more versatile Timeline Window would be useful—with buttons for quick zoom out for viewing the entire story, and zooming back in to a previous view setting, as well as “speed-dial” buttons for quick re-centering on frequent locations.
Hi,
Perhaps we could duplicate the Tab functionality in the Whiteboard, which exactly allows you to go between two predefined zoom levels, exactly to go between work and overview. It works in the whiteboard, and should work just fine in the timeline as well. I’ll make a ticket.
I’m a little more unsure about predefined locations, and whether this is actually a help. I feel like you almost move around too much for this to be useful, and it would bring in a UI that people have to babysit in order to save favorite locations.
Perhaps this is more about why the timeline doesn’t automatically show you what you want to see when you work in other areas. Would you be able to spend a little bit of time pondering if there’s a pattern to the things you’d like to automatically frame for in the timeline based on what you’re doing in other areas?
Per
Here’s one usage case: When I work on a script I typically have a spot at the end where I keep scenes and scene fragments. Depending on which s/w I am using, I may bookmark the spot or open another editor window centered on that section so that I can return to cut or copy material for insertion in my current work area. I actually do it a lot. In Causality, I keep a bunch of beats around, either after THE END or near the area I’m working on. So I think it would be helpful to have a way to jump to a particular spot and magnification level.
Back when I was doing 3D animation, I relied heavily on Viewport memories that allowed me to jump to particular views with a click, and then return to my editing view.
Maybe there’s a bookmark function I’m not seeing..
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I do the same thing: move beats to a spot past THE END for “storage”. Often these go into the next episode, but not always. (Juggling beats is standard in TV series.)
But, it’s also possible I’m not properly using Causality, and there could be a better spot to store and load beats. I know the product was designed around the concept of beat construction and management.
Hi,
I think you or someone suggested this previously, and I didn’t understand the use case, but now I do.
So I guess the suggestion is for bookmarks, which then also include a zoom level, and then a keyboard shortcut to trigger it.
A bookmark would actually be a timeline position, so I guess a bookmark would remember the following:
- Timeline position
- Timeline zoom
- Whiteboard zoom
I’d be more reluctant to also remember the script view settings, because you could easily end up jumping between wildly different modes, and I don’t think anyone would love it.
There’s one difficulty, which is that Causality is about to become a multi-user document, and then we have to answer who owns the shortcuts. The easy places to store them is either for everyone (usually bad, people have their own preferences), or just on the device (but then you don’t even have the shortcuts on your other computer).
Once they have to live in your user profile, so that they appear to yourself on all your own devices, it becomes much harder, because the user profile is technically a separate document. Or bookmarks are keyed by user ID, and then they’re all in the shared document, but you can only see your own.
Point is that ownership becomes a riddle when you dig into it.
The question is if the real need isn’t to have separate timelines that you can move things back and forth between. Because then we’re solving the wrong problem. Now, multiple timelines is much harder, but we know it’s something we’ll have to do one day.
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I would have imagined bookmarks being part of a basic set of viewing functions shared by users across a multiple user document. That said, I am probably not one of those who will be working in real multi-user mode. I am fine sending files back and forth with a co-writer.
In many ways, script and story development is similar to software development, and unless we have RCS-style revision functions, I might avoid going multi-user.
Hi,
The multi-user functionality is basically a real-time Git, except that merges happen all the time. But it keeps infinite history, so you can see an edit trail.
Nevertheless, even any particular person doesn’t want to sync (remember that sync is also yourself on multiple devices including mobile where sending files isn’t realistic), we can’t design the feature to be expressly sync hostile.
The reason I bring up the ownership is that I’ve been in spaces before where nothing belongs to anyone, and you quickly end up with lots of objects named for the user. It becomes a culture to name “End Of Episode - Bob’s View”, and “End of Other Episode - Jane’s View”.
I forgot to mention that there is another option if the specific use case is only to go to a junk yard at the end of the script. Episodes have always been first-class citizens in the code, but changing episodes has been cumbersome. You can now select episodes from a dropdown. This is currently in Beta at Beta Downloads :: Causality Story Sequencer :: Hollywood Camera Work
This primarily operates in the script, but any scrolling will make the timeline and whiteboard go to that place.
You basically abuse the episode system to create multiple timelines, and I like this approach, because it side-steps the entire problem of timelines diverging and then needing increasing amounts of babysitting to be merged back into each other. If they all live on the same master timeline back to back, all the lanes are the same, all the tags are the same. I think it’s a winner.
The purpose of this episode selector is ultimately to hide non-current episodes in the timeline and whiteboard. And now you effectively have multiple timelines or multiple documents in the same document, without the massive problems of the documents becoming incompatible because they diverge too much.