Cutting Room View - new and totally redesigned

We give you a pretty good deal with Moviestorm. You can download the core software for free, and we work hard to ship regular updates and improvements. Those updates are also free. Usually, we'll give you a handful of bugfixes, a handful of new content, and a new feature or two. Some updates are bigger than others, of course, but every new release brings something shiny.

We're hard at work on the next big update right now, and it's going to be great. You see, we've made a few changes to Moviestorm's venerable Cutting Room View ... and when I say "we've made a few changes", what I mean is that we've spent months completely redesigning and improving the Cutting Room View, almost from the ground up. Here's how it looks in the current released version of Moviestorm (version 1.2.0.2):

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And here's the same movie as it appears in our latest development snapshot.

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There's a lot that's changed, so let's go through it one thing at a time.

The timeline
We've given the timeline more room on the screen, so it's easier to see what's going on. The way the tracks are used has changed as well, giving more prominence to the picture track. You'll notice that each item on the timeline has useful additional information. Movie footage clips now show their scene name as well as the camera name (so you'll never have to wonder "which Main Camera is this?" again). We've also added timecodes to the start and end of each clip. It's hard to describe how useful that is until you try it out, but it makes you wonder how you managed without it. The behaviour of objects on the timeline should be more logical, too, allowing you to drag objects to the timeline and have them snap into position, and allowing you to change the order of objects on the timeline without becoming hopelessly confused.

Objects on the timeline have a more logical colour scheme now. Shots from the same camera will share a common pastel colour. If you've added additional cameras, they'll each automatically get their own colour.

The preview window
Yes, it's smaller. That might seem like a step backwards, until you notice the extra button next to the playback controls. That triggers fullscreen mode (an entirely new View which allows you to watch your movie in all its glory, without any buttons and bits getting in the way).

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The clip bin
Adding audio or images is easy with the new Cutting Room View. Just drag and drop from the new "clip bin" area to the timeline. The same drag-and-drop functionality is used to add your camera cuts to the timeline. The tab which contains your camera cuts was always pretty awkward. Once your movie gained more than about a half dozen shots, the list became pretty cluttered. Plus, it had those weird invisible '+' buttons. The Movie Footage tab in the clip bin contains all your camera cuts, from every camera in every scene, presented as a much more logical list of thumbnails. Each cut is timestamped so you can see exactly where it came from, and they're grouped according to scene and camera. There's no need to find the hidden button to add a clip to the timeline any more - just drag and drop.

Extra shiny bits
As well as all these improvements, we've also added some brand new features. The first is the Transitions tab, which allows you to choose from a list of different transition types for your shots. If you're like me, you'll use a straight cut most of the time. That's fine: just drag your clips to the timeline and Moviestorm will use a straight cut by default. Occasionally, though, you'll want to use a different transition - maybe a cross-fade, or a fade-through-black. For the first time, you can now do that within the Cutting Room View. Just drag the new transition onto the timeline. It'll snap into position between your two clips and will apply the appropriate transition in real-time.

Incidentally, that means that Moviestorm is playing back two pieces of action at the same time, and overlaying one onto the other (and that's real-time 3D events, not pre-rendered video clips). That's some seriously clever coding from Julian, Conor and the rest of the Engineering team.

Finally, and for the really fun eye candy, we're ready to release the filters which we've teased you with for so long. Filters are dragged onto clips, and can apply some subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes. Your external video editor might already have some filters, of course, and there's nothing to stop you using them in the same way you always have. The great thing about applying the filters within Moviestorm, though, is that we can use the 3D data from the movie to do things that a 2D filter simply couldn't achieve. Moviestorm's Fog filter, for example, will apply a stronger fog distortion the further away an object is from the camera.

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So. That's the new Cutting Room View. We're still working on the final bits of tweaks and polish, but we're pretty confident that it'll be ready for the next major Moviestorm Release - version 1.3.

Big thanks - as always - to the members of the Moviestorm Pioneers Club, who have been helping us out with their opinions, suggestions and comments throughout the redesign process.

Our codebase is bigger than yours

Conor just committed subversion revision number 20,000 to the Moviestorm codebase. That's a lot of code.

Pimpin' Conor's Ride

It all started as an innocent prank. Conor left his precious car unattended in the car park and forgot to switch on the CCTV linked to his desktop, and so one lunchtime, we decided to grab ourselves some free advertising space...


In revenge, Conor grabbed a spray can and did a Very Bad Thing to Rhys's shiny new wheels. (Yeah, we know he's only 15 and isn't allowed to drive, but he decided to splash his first week's pay on something spectacular. There's nothing stopping you owning a car at 15. He just has to get someone else to chauffeur it for him. There's a rota in the kitchen for whose turn it is to drive Rhys home each evening. I think we must be overpaying him. Mark and Jules couldn't afford one of these until their second week. But then again, they have kids & mortgages, so maybe it does make sense.)


OK, so that was it, we thought. But no. Rhys just had to go one step too far...

A strange breed of programmer

Everyone knows that a real programmer's desk looks like this. Big piles of paper, assorted beverage bottles, post-its and generally, complete chaos. (Sorry - a complex and detailed filing system that is perfectly comprehensible to the programmer in question.)

Conor hard at work

So what in the hell is this? Flowers? Sunshine? Pure, fresh water? Even a clear desk? This is not a proper programming environment!

Paul Sumpner daydreaming