First, I'm having a lot of fun with PD. I use it only for MTS editing (AVCHD camera captures and data recovery for customer videos)...so far... There's almost nothing else out there that handles these HD video containers so well. I'm awe-struck. It's so nice to just open one of these files without the system gagging on video codecs that choke on mts file streams! (This is on a quad core AMD 2.6G system with 4G ECC RAM and terabytes of data storage).
There are a few usability enhancements I'd really like to see in future revisions. These are (in no particular order):
- Remember where project files were last saved. PD doesn't do this at the moment, and it's worse when it crashes (as it does with the sometimes very damaged video files I need to edit in PD), I basically have to start over again unless I save just before a crash (maybe that would be a usability enhancement - on crash, save first )
Even then, when I go to open a previously saved file (I keep all my PD projects in one folder) PD never remembers where the project files are. It always defaults to My Documents. Bzzzzt. Bad idea. Too much extra mousework for me, every single time I try to open a project.
- On a similar subject, ditto for all the file open and browse dialogs - please remember where the last browse dialog was opened.
- Ditto for creating folders in the browse dialog - for exports (and other browsable folders) it's possible to browse to a folder, add non-existent subfolder in the edit field, then when PD tries to export the project (if I forget to create the folder in Opus or Explorer) PD gets all confused.
Having the ability to add a folder in the standard dialogs would solve that problem. The current dialogs don't have any editing facility, that needs to be changed to allow adding/deleting/renaming/moving, as per the windows standard dialogs. It should just be a different wm_ call to get the additional functions in the dialogs.
- It would be helpful if I could get PD to NOT split video imports. Currently, every time I add multiple media files (i.e. not just a whole media folder), it always splits the clips, even if I disable the split button in the initial browse dialog. That would save a lot of time, and I can then manually kick off the autosplit when I need it on a clip(s).
That's about all I can think of for now.
I guess some of this could be simplified by adding a projects directory to the config dialogs (as well as the current import and export folders). I never (EVER) keep any project files for any application on my boot drive, it's an unacceptable risk in this instance, and I manage my swap and temporary volumes myself : user, system, and swap volumes are on separate disk spindles for performance and data partitioning in the event of a single drive failure, and all my data lives on RAID5 volumes with hot swap/hot spare facility.
So all my projects in all my apps (PD, Premiere Pro, Protel DXP, whatever) live on one of my RAID volumes (mapped as My Documents) or not at all.
Hard-coding C:\Documents and Settings\etc is another real trap in these cases - most software that hard-codes these also hard-code C:\Program Files (which is a significant problem on XP x64!) and that code generally expects My Documents to be mapped to C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents, which leads to very interesting problems down the track (during an upgrade, or uninstall for example). Data is not Information; Information is not Knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom.