This proposal stems from an discussion on the Mailinglist starting with the quote from Walter Murch "Marble and Clay".
It is thought to be in support and to complement nasa’s Delectus Shot Evaluator

The central Idea is to remove the difference between "viewing", i.e. the media viewer and the timeline/Sequence on the other hand. Lumiera is designed to handle multiple Sequences, which can even arbitrarily be embedded in one another (the so called meta-clips ). Basically, Sequences are a comparatively cheap resource, so the idea is to create a new Sequence on-the-fly to do the viewing already based on a complete timeline. It is up to the user finally to promote one of these workbench-like timelines to become "the" master timeline.

To make this usable, in the GUI there should be a slightly different representation which aims at reducing vertical screen usage. Also the track heads could be reduced, e.g. we don’t need controls for mixing and panning, the effect stacks could be reduced to a simple mark indicating that there is any effect in a given time range, anything concerned with the fine points of wiring, tweaking effects and controling automation could be left out deliberately. This would allow us to have several independant timelines above/below each other. There could be at least two, maybe even three or four "slots" which could be allocated by a timeline to display. Every time you open a new media, a new Sequence will be created on the fly and a new timeline display of this Sequence will be available, replacing the least recently used timeline display slot. Of course, re-visiting an already opened media will bring back the corresponding timeline in the state you left it, with markers, notes, maybe even trimmings and added clips. Contrast this GUI mode with the usual working mode (the "clay mode"), where there is one central timeline, probably with tabs to switch between multiple independant Sequences (including the ones which actually are embedded in another timeline as meta-clips)

Basically, each of these timelines has a separate, independant transport, but transports can be locked together, and in locked state you can displace/offset the locked partners relative to one another. Moreover, there would be at least two viewer windows which would be automatically connected to recieve the ouput of the timelines as new timelines are placed in the visible slots to work with. To round things up, we need good keybindings for navigtation, and of course you can liberally mark parts and spill them over to another timeline, either overwriting or shifting existing footage there.

Technically, to support this working mode, opening a media would:

Initially this new Sequence would be anonymous. But the moment you do the first non-trivial modification there (like adding a label, trimming off parts, adding /deleting tracks), the new Sequence would be promoted to be a named and persisted entity, which from then on could itself serve as a new "pseudo-media". It would appear as an asset on its own (probably in a special sub category), and it could be used as a source to create clips from. This way, you could work with your media, prepare it, augment it even by adding effects like colour correction. And because it’s a real Sequence, you could do non-trivial things there right in-place, like adding new sub-tracks, placing other media on them — and then later on use this prepared media like a real media captured from camera source.

Finally, there should be the possibility to "play" a clip bin, thereby on-the-fly creating a new Sequence filled with all the clips in the order they were arranged in the bin. This would yield a bridge to the more clip-oriented working style and also provide a cheap implementation of the "sparse timeline" or "storyboard mode"

Everyone likes this and we want to have this. But this is rather a concept which needs a lot more discussion for the implementation. Further details may follow where these thingsare worked out.

Back to Lumiera Design Process overview