[Draft discussion] Video support

The comment on Reddit mentions xjadeo so yeah I’m guessing it’s referring to the same thing.

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Very well. Since there is no real content here, let’s just close this request (which I created as part of Bitwish’ launch).

No, wait, the votes! :slight_smile:

Alright, the duplicates have been merged and 3 votes have been moved here. Yay, the system works!

Sorry for the noise caused by the moved. We will remove all this when the draft is promoted to #features

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@_ttc Can you explain briefly what “video support” means, please, for someone who has never seen video support in a DAW?

Video Track says:

You can use the video track to play back video events. Video files are displayed as events/clips on the video track, with thumbnails representing the frames in the film.

Is that it or is there more? It would be great if you could add these details in the description.

Would these be requests part of basic video support or could they be separate requests? In general we prefer to have requests as modular as possible so that users and developers can consider them one at a time. We can link them when they are related.

My number 1 feature request.

I think video compatibility should inculde the option to import a video, have its audio in a dedicated track, have the project set according to that video’s specs (sample rate wise. Also having the timeline showing hh:mm:ss as well) and the option to export audio and video together to be able to send a demo straight from bitwig, without having to pass through a video-editing software.

Video-support would also mean 5.1 audio and, ideally, support for formats like OMF (formats that allow to import not only the video and 1 audio track, but the video and as many audio tracks as there are in the video-editing project and arrange them accordingly on the timeline, to have the audio project to look just like the video project).

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@knoqz @_ttc and anyone else interested in this feature. What about renaming the title to “Video tracks”? This is the core feature requested, if I understand you correctly. A video track where you can drag a video to create music synced with it?

Could you define in the description the minimum set of features required for the implementation of a video track? It is better to create separate requests for additional features. This is the direction where we seem to be going, see How to process requests that contain many features (you are invited to participate in that discussion).

I think the bare minimum would be to have it so that bitwig loads both video and audio of a video file, one in a video track with a resizeable floating video window, the other as just another audio track. Finally, it should be able to export the project as a video file of some kind.

I hear what you’re saying about the other features, and I fully understand how 5.1 could fall into this category. The OMF thing I find a bit different though.

I’m not sure how much it would make sense to propose OMF compatibility for a DAW that doesn’t fully support videos yet. At the same time, I think the video compatibility should ideally come with the possibility of loading OMF files.

Just so it’s clear, I mentioned OMF to make an example but what I’m actually saying is that video compatibility should come with the possibility of exchanging sessions between video-editing softwares and DAWs. So I’m talking OMF, AAF, XML etc.

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Totally agree.

Of course I would love to see OMF and surround or even Atmos support in Bitwig, but these are different features and there are certainly other priorities now.

Either we take @knoqz’s comment as the scope for this request and we strip out ther rest… or we move this topic to #brainstorm to create new separate requests. What do you prefer?

In 24 hours this might be the most voted incomplete draft. It’s time to decide something.

Sorry if this is a long response, I tried editing it to make it short enough…I failed :sweat_smile:

Personally, I don’t think we should look at this as a matter of “how many features should we be requesting”, I believe this is about making Bitwig suitable to work with video (more on this at the end).

This would mean beginning to work on this stuff. It would take years to make it fully competetive, but I believe it could eventually get there.
As a matter of fact, if they are working on this (and they very well might be, or at least they might have considered this), I doubt they’re not taking at least some of these points in consideration.

Video compatibility by itself would allow for some scoring and sound design. It is technically already achievable via 3rd party solutions, but it surely would be nice to have it native. It’s more of a whim than a need though.

OMF-AAF-XML compatibility and 5.1/7.1 would allow full-blown audio editing, sound design and mixing for video and would make it possible to work with video editors with an adequate workflow (especially OMF/AAF/XML compatibility. I actually see this as more important than the video player itself as a feature).
None of this is achievable in any other way (apart from using a different DAW obviously).

Asking for the two (or three if we really wanna get specific) things separately could still make sense since - as I was saying - there are video-player plugins and some people like to mix music in 5.1 and so on.
I doubt anybody would care about this kind of requests since they’re a bit TOO specific.

My way of looking at this is:

If the point is to make Bitwig more interesting to more than just music producers and to allow sound designers, sound editors etc. to actually leave other options behind at some point, than I believe we should mention everything.

We’re not here to give orders after all, we’re manifesting an interest in something.
I want to let them know that there is interest in making bitwig good for working with video (in this sense - once again - OMF-AAF-XML are a MUST).

At the end of the day, even if they decide to do something about this, they’ll do whatever they see fit either way.

On the other hand, if the point is to allow musicians and music producers to occasionally load a video to make some music without having to rely on a plugin to do it than ok but, to me, it sounds a bit more narrow than specific as a request.

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@knoqz Thank you so much for this rationale. I think it makes sense. Sorry if I challenge some proposals sometimes, it’s just for the sake of finding out what makes more sense in these first days of Bitwish.

Alright, let’s translate all these thoughts in the description considering the advice from Writing a good feature request?

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sorry, only read this now. No problem at all, I will write something down later!

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To make Bitwig more useful for sound designers that work with video, in my opinion there are three aspects:

  1. Ability to import at least one video into the timeline, and have a window or panel which plays this video (the implementation in Reaper is a good example
  2. Ability to import OMF/AAF files prepared by Premiere or other NLEs. (xml files as well would be nice but i imagine it would be extremely complicated as they refer to both video and audio files. aaf and omf refer to audio files only)
  3. 5.1/7.1 channel support

For most of my projects I could get by with just the first two.

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Sorry if it took me a while, had a busy couple of days!
Anyway, I tried editing the original post to include everything that was said in the thread. Let me know what you think about it.

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Very good, thank you. As the average reader that I am (with no personal experience producing music for video or video), I have some questions. I’m happy to help improve the description with the answers.

Are all these formats really required, or all of them equally important? Can we define some priorities in case not all of them are feasible?

What is RTC? I think I understand grid cue markers

What is MTC?

Also, isn’t it a bit counterintuitive that we are proposing features to get rid of a second DAW but then here we ask for something to better sync with a second DAW? This feature request is already very beefy. Could this be removed?

These are Dolby formats. I wonder what is the business behind them, and whether shipping Bitwig with this support means a higher cost for Bitwig for every license sold to pay Dolby royalties or something.

Anyway, is this really required for a first release? This is related to the same point about this request being already very beefy.

This is a more open question. What kind of producers using Bitwig today can we expect to need this video support? What kind of producers would move to Bitwig if if this video support would exist? Is this about short videos, experimental stuff, film scoring…

I mean, if a video producer is using another DAW with well established video support, there must be a musical reason why they would switch to Bitwig, because the video support itself would be basically the same (best case scenario, unless Bitwig now decides to start innovating on video support).

(Also, should we change the owner for attribution? This software doesn’t allow to have multiple authors. Not very important but this came to mind as I was quopting these fragments from the description). :slight_smile:

Are all these formats really required, or all of them equally important? Can we define some priorities in case not all of them are feasible?

I’d say OMF, AAF and XML are the most common, ALE is Avid Log Exchange, so it’s about files coming from Avide Media Composer (which is pretty much the industry standard). EDL are the least used and most basic in my experience.

What is RTC? I think I understand grid cue markers

I changed RTC to Real Time. I was hinting at the fact that we can have a real-time ruler on the timeline.

What is MTC?

MTC = Midi Time Code
I left it there from the original post. I think the reasoning behind it would be that if soemone wanted to use Bitwig to do music or sound design but keep their project in cubase/protools/what have you for whatever reason; it might be that they’re not working alone, might be that Bitwig might not include all needed features from the beginning. Might be personal preference for some reason. This is actually a relatively common way of working, I know of people scoring in cubase and still using cubase as a slave for pro tools.

It would also depend on the nature of the job, say that you have to do sound design for a specific bit of a project that is originally meant for Pro Tools, you might want to be able to keep the project in Pro Tools while sound designing in bitwig (using MTC input), bounce and send to Pro Tools. I’m just trying to come out with examples on the fly but the scenarios are pretty much limitless.

These are Dolby formats. I wonder what is the business behind them, and whether shipping Bitwig with this support means a higher cost for Bitwig for every license sold to pay Dolby royalties or something.

I don’t know if there’s a problem with getting licenses from dolby (but that could be yet another reason to have MTC sync in). I know that all major competitors in the post-production side of things have it though so I wouldn’t suppose that’s a big problem. Anyway that’s the main reason I left those at the very end of the request.

What kind of producers using Bitwig today can we expect to need this video support? What kind of producers would move to Bitwig if if this video support would exist? Is this about short videos, experimental stuff, film scoring…
I mean, if a video producer is using another DAW with well established video support, there must be a musical reason why they would switch to Bitwig, because the video support itself would be basically the same

As I was saying in my long rant about why we should include all of this in the request, it’s not necessarily about producers.

The point is: we’d like for Bitwig to be fully usable by sound designers, sound editors and even sound mixers (this last one I personally think is gonna be a stretch since the mixing workflow is not so great even for audio-only projects).
Now, I’m not sure what you mean with “video producer”, I guess youtubers would fall under that category, ultimately I don’t know why they should choose bitwig, but I also don’t see why whoever chooses bitwig to work with audio shouldn’t be able to work on audio for video as well. Especially sound designers since Bitwig leans pretty heavily towards that userbase.

I can only speak for myself but I believe I’m not the only one in this situation:
I switched to Bitwig because I like how flexible it is and how it lets me choose how to setup my workflow. I can approach every project differently without having to rely on external gear and that’s a huge advantage.
I have to keep using pro tools and logic (mostly logic these days since I’m not doing much post anymore, just some music and sounds - and pro tools doesn’t run as smoothly on my imac - but if I had to work with someone else or with a team I would surely still use it).
If I had the chance to use Bitwig I would start using exclusively that.
I would still keep logic and pro tools for safety (as I mentioned, I doubt this feature would be 100% perfect right out of the box) but I’d always try to begin with Bitwig.

Also, should we change the owner for attribution? This software doesn’t allow to have multiple authors. Not very important but this came to mind as I was quopting these fragments from the description

ahahah that’s fine, if there’s no way of doing it I’m ok either way :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Thank you, all this makes a lot of sense. Later today I’ll review the description with the intention of leaving it ready for the move to #features .

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Another iteration. Please check the description. I will leave at least 24 horas to see if there are any comments, before moving this request to #features

I have removed the MTC / sync DAW point because this goes beyond video support and it needs to be discussed separately. Bitwig already offers several options to sync with other sources, and if there is anything missing, a request would cover more cases than video support.

I have also removed the Atmos request. 3D audio is another feature in its own, with applications that go beyond video support.

I am not arguing that these features are part of the pack, but the pack as it is is big already, and these two extra features may get support from users who aren’t concerned about video support. Modularity is important. :slight_smile:

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