Alex.Mitchell
04-03-2011, 07:04 PM
Hello Redusers and Foundry Staff!
I've been using Storm for a little bit now and, while I am really enjoying the overall design and functionality of Storm, there are some things I would love to add my two cents on if they'll help the program out a little.
-There should be a way to set a default viewing style for bins. For instance, I might want to have new bins default to the hybrid list/icon view as opposed to the icon view. Also, it would be cool if there was a contextual menu to change the viewing styles of every bin at once, if possible.
-I had a lot of clips in the "In Tray" bin, and I was trying to sort them into smaller, magazine based bins. This was a pretty difficult task for two reasons:
1. When I dragged clips from the "In Tray" to "A001" it would switch from looking at the contents of the "In Tray" bin to the contents of the "A001" bin. This meant that I had to add an extra click to sort all this footage, which added up over forty magazines' worth of footage. I feel like it would be more efficient if dragging clips into another bin didn't switch the bin you were looking at.
2. When I did click back to view the contents of the "In Tray" bin, the scroll bar would reset itself so that I had to scroll down the list to look at the clips at the bottom, every time. It would be cool if the position of the scroll persisted when you switched from bin to bin.
- When I was renaming bins I found it a little cumbersome to do without the mouse. The key commands were as follows:
1. Hit enter to start renaming the bin
2. Hit enter to finish renaming the bin
3. Hit shift-tab to get back to the bin window and select the bin you just finished renaming
4. Hit up -or- down to go to the next bin that you want renamed
5. Hit enter to start renaming the next bin
I'm not sure why the default behaviour in this case is to select the contents of the bin after renaming it, but I think it could be more efficient if done differently. Example:
1. Hit enter to start renaming the bin
2. Hit up -or- down to finish renaming the bin and navigate to the next bin that you want renamed
3. Hit enter to start renaming the next bin
- It would be nice if there was a way to change the default behaviour for double clicking footage. Right now when I double click on footage, it opens up another tab in the viewer. Because they render previews in the background (I think), this is a really quick way to use up a lot of resources if I'm just looking at clips with my DOP. I know that you can just drag a clip onto the viewer to keep it from opening a new tab, but it would be cool if you could do it another way like a key-modified double click (e.g., holding down option while double clicking) or selectable behaviour in the preferences.
- When you're reorganizing bins there needs to be a visual indicator of when a bin will be dropped into another bin or when a bin will just be re-organized in the bin list. When a bin is dragged onto another bin, the bin that you're dropping into will highlight, which is good! However, when a bin is being re-organized in the list of bins there is no visual indicator to denote where in the list the bin will be moved to. It would be nice if there was a line that was drawn between the folder icons to indicate where the moved bin will be in the list.
- There's no way to automatically sort clips by their metadata (name, reel #, date, etc.) in a bin without going into list mode. There should be a button or a contextual menu to sort clips, in any viewing style.
- Could there be an option in the preferences to have a dialogue that pops up when the application opens that asks you which project you'd like to open? Or even an option to open the last project that you were working on when the application starts up?
- A lot of the time when I'm playing a clip (On my first gen unibody 15" macbook pro) I'll press play, the clip will play for one or two frames, and then not move again until I stop it and hit play again. It's just something that happens a lot, so it may just be that my system is slow. Still, it's a nonstandard behaviour and I feel like it should be addressed. System specs to follow.
- Ran into a bug where every clip I double clicked or dragged onto the viewer would reference one clip in particular. I tried deleting the preferences and application support folder, logging into a different user account, reconnecting the media and syncing the media, but the problem persisted. The only solution was to delete clips from the project and re-import them. This destroyed the metadata though, and I lost a lot of time just getting back to where I was. I wish I had kept the project file, but in the heat of fixing everything I saved over it.
- When I'm dragging a tag onto multiple clips the tags only stick when the tag window is floating. If the tag window is nested as a tab in another section of the interface, the tag will only stick on the clip that I drag it to, even if there are multiple clips highlighted.
Anyway, I'm only mentioning stuff I'd like to have changed, but overall I'm really pleased with Storm! I've also had some problems that other people have had, like some horrendous low-pass filtering for scaling during export with the Lanczos3 scaling filter, but I spent the money and I'm glad I did. Once some of the little growing pains are ironed out I think this will become one of the most important applications in my workflow. :-)
System Specs:
Storm 1.0v2
Mac OS 10.6.7
Late 2008 15" Unibody Macbook Pro
Core 2 Duo 2.53 GHz
Geforce 9600m GT w/ 512 MB RAM
4GB RAM
320 GB 5400 RPM Drive
Silicon Image 3132 eSATA Expresscard Card
DataOptic four bay port multiplier enclosure
(4) 1TB 7200 RPM Hitachi drives
I've been using Storm for a little bit now and, while I am really enjoying the overall design and functionality of Storm, there are some things I would love to add my two cents on if they'll help the program out a little.
-There should be a way to set a default viewing style for bins. For instance, I might want to have new bins default to the hybrid list/icon view as opposed to the icon view. Also, it would be cool if there was a contextual menu to change the viewing styles of every bin at once, if possible.
-I had a lot of clips in the "In Tray" bin, and I was trying to sort them into smaller, magazine based bins. This was a pretty difficult task for two reasons:
1. When I dragged clips from the "In Tray" to "A001" it would switch from looking at the contents of the "In Tray" bin to the contents of the "A001" bin. This meant that I had to add an extra click to sort all this footage, which added up over forty magazines' worth of footage. I feel like it would be more efficient if dragging clips into another bin didn't switch the bin you were looking at.
2. When I did click back to view the contents of the "In Tray" bin, the scroll bar would reset itself so that I had to scroll down the list to look at the clips at the bottom, every time. It would be cool if the position of the scroll persisted when you switched from bin to bin.
- When I was renaming bins I found it a little cumbersome to do without the mouse. The key commands were as follows:
1. Hit enter to start renaming the bin
2. Hit enter to finish renaming the bin
3. Hit shift-tab to get back to the bin window and select the bin you just finished renaming
4. Hit up -or- down to go to the next bin that you want renamed
5. Hit enter to start renaming the next bin
I'm not sure why the default behaviour in this case is to select the contents of the bin after renaming it, but I think it could be more efficient if done differently. Example:
1. Hit enter to start renaming the bin
2. Hit up -or- down to finish renaming the bin and navigate to the next bin that you want renamed
3. Hit enter to start renaming the next bin
- It would be nice if there was a way to change the default behaviour for double clicking footage. Right now when I double click on footage, it opens up another tab in the viewer. Because they render previews in the background (I think), this is a really quick way to use up a lot of resources if I'm just looking at clips with my DOP. I know that you can just drag a clip onto the viewer to keep it from opening a new tab, but it would be cool if you could do it another way like a key-modified double click (e.g., holding down option while double clicking) or selectable behaviour in the preferences.
- When you're reorganizing bins there needs to be a visual indicator of when a bin will be dropped into another bin or when a bin will just be re-organized in the bin list. When a bin is dragged onto another bin, the bin that you're dropping into will highlight, which is good! However, when a bin is being re-organized in the list of bins there is no visual indicator to denote where in the list the bin will be moved to. It would be nice if there was a line that was drawn between the folder icons to indicate where the moved bin will be in the list.
- There's no way to automatically sort clips by their metadata (name, reel #, date, etc.) in a bin without going into list mode. There should be a button or a contextual menu to sort clips, in any viewing style.
- Could there be an option in the preferences to have a dialogue that pops up when the application opens that asks you which project you'd like to open? Or even an option to open the last project that you were working on when the application starts up?
- A lot of the time when I'm playing a clip (On my first gen unibody 15" macbook pro) I'll press play, the clip will play for one or two frames, and then not move again until I stop it and hit play again. It's just something that happens a lot, so it may just be that my system is slow. Still, it's a nonstandard behaviour and I feel like it should be addressed. System specs to follow.
- Ran into a bug where every clip I double clicked or dragged onto the viewer would reference one clip in particular. I tried deleting the preferences and application support folder, logging into a different user account, reconnecting the media and syncing the media, but the problem persisted. The only solution was to delete clips from the project and re-import them. This destroyed the metadata though, and I lost a lot of time just getting back to where I was. I wish I had kept the project file, but in the heat of fixing everything I saved over it.
- When I'm dragging a tag onto multiple clips the tags only stick when the tag window is floating. If the tag window is nested as a tab in another section of the interface, the tag will only stick on the clip that I drag it to, even if there are multiple clips highlighted.
Anyway, I'm only mentioning stuff I'd like to have changed, but overall I'm really pleased with Storm! I've also had some problems that other people have had, like some horrendous low-pass filtering for scaling during export with the Lanczos3 scaling filter, but I spent the money and I'm glad I did. Once some of the little growing pains are ironed out I think this will become one of the most important applications in my workflow. :-)
System Specs:
Storm 1.0v2
Mac OS 10.6.7
Late 2008 15" Unibody Macbook Pro
Core 2 Duo 2.53 GHz
Geforce 9600m GT w/ 512 MB RAM
4GB RAM
320 GB 5400 RPM Drive
Silicon Image 3132 eSATA Expresscard Card
DataOptic four bay port multiplier enclosure
(4) 1TB 7200 RPM Hitachi drives