I'm using PD to make simple music videos. I come from an audio background, and I am used to using DAW's to edit. I miss some of the features that you usually find in the audio world in PD17. Specifically - Solo-In-Place and the ability to "mute" video clips. But I am wondering if that is because I am doing things in an awkward way and there is a better way to do it. I need to explain this.


My projects are multiotracked audio-plus-video. That is, I have anumber of audio tracks recorded in different takes by overdubbing, and each has one or more video tracks that go with it. My workflow goes like this:

1. set up 2 cams in my recording studio, and all the audio gear (mics/DI instruments, whatever - these are recorded to a Zoom HD recorder).


2. Lay down the first track (this might be guitar + vocals). Now I have 1 or more audio tracks, and one video track per cam. T^here might be more than one "take" - I call each take out at the start so I can ID it later, and usually I just snap my fingers a few times (poor man's clapper board) before the music starts so I can later sync the audio tracks together. I usually just leave the audio and cams recording until I get a good take (usually after 2 or 3 times). So might have 15mins of audio and video now.


3. Overdubs. This is a new set of audio and video files, again there can be a few takes. More finger snaps on the lead-in.

Now I have all the source audio and video, next step is to pull all the audio files into a DAW and get a good mix. That gives me eventually a 3:30 wav file plus the intro with count in and finger snaps. I Also place a marker in the DAW project so I can see where the start of the wav is (important so I can do a remix later without the count-ins and finger snaps, and get the sync correct).

Now starts the video editing fun. I

1. Start a new project in PD, first step is to pull in the audio and align it to start of project - this is the common timing reference for everything.


2. Pull in the video tracks (one base track and one overdub, 2 cams each = 4 video files) and find the matching takes that I used from teh DAW. Trim them on the timeline and sync them. (This is where I wish PD had a feature to LOCK POSITION of the video tracks so they can be cut up but not moved!)


3. Now I usually apply some colour correction to the source videos and render them seperately one-by-one to new "preprocessed" files. This reduces the file sizes a lot which helps PD - although it costs some time.


4. Now I make a new project with the same audio and the processed files. If I did eveyrthing right, they all sync perfectly when I align everything to the start of the timeline.


5. Now I can finally find where I want to cut between tracks, cut the timeline where I want to, and move the clips down to a new "composite track".


6. Finally I apply pan-zoom to any segments that I want to, add text, any other stuff.


7. Replace audio with a new version minus count-in and finger snaps (and any tweaks I might want to do to the audio mix).


8. Render the finished video.

So here are some features (borrowed from audio edit world) that I would like and would make my life easier:

1. fix video tracks in place so they cannot lose sync (but still allow them to be cut, pan/zoomed, filtered etc)


2. allow clips to be "deactivated" (i.e. turned off without being deleted) - now I would not have to move clips to a composite track - just deactivate the ones I don't want to see


3. "solo" a video track - i.e. pres a button and have only one video track enabled, all others off. (release "solo" and you revert to whatever you had before.)

Does this make sense? is there a much easier of doing what I want to do? (I did look at multi-cam stuff but it doesn't seem to quite do what I want ... )

thank you

Daniel