VPX Feedback Button - Features In Consideration/Planning - Comments

browj2 wrote on 9/24/2024, 12:44 PM

Hi,

In VPX16, there is a new button at the right of the top menu - Feedback. Clicking on this opens the following in the Media Pool MAGIX Hub:

You can expand these to see details:

The only feedback that you can give is clicking on the thumbs up button to like it.

To start a little differently, Magix came out with Magix Capture in VPX16 and MMS2025, a new interface and way to record video from a webcam, audio with a mic and the computer screen with no audio. There are problems - no Mono/Stereo option, the audio goes to MP3 instead of wave, and the audio recorded at 44.1 kHz instead of 48 kHz, including the audio with the video. Someone didn't understand that this is for a video editing program. I don't ever recall anyone asking for this thing and given the current difficulties being experienced by Magix, one has to wonder what on earth they were thinking.

Rather than committing scarce audio resources to fixing an excellent program like Sound Forge Audio Cleaning Lab 4 so that it works properly (startup error and ARA problems) and properly with VPX as the External Audio Editor, they chose to waste these resources on Capture.

How do you feel about Capture? Should the above problems be fixed? Or should SFACL4 be fixed instead?

For those who have never used Audio Cleaning Lab, it is an excellent tool for recording, cleaning and mastering audio and it has 1 feature that most video editors could use - spectral cleaning. It is the very much advanced version of Music Editor 3 and is supposed to work with VPX/MMS as the External Audio Editor.

On to the new things under consideration.

I'll bypass the Extension of the speech to text functionality. Other may want to comment on their usefulness.

1. AI Source material sorting - Incorrect recordings and faulty images:

The AI is supposed to help me recognize and sort out shaky, blurred and duplicate images in my source material.

I think that I can see shaky and blurred images myself without help. Duplicate images? What do they mean? Duplicate file names? I can't see the program going through everything on my hard drives, looking at each image, video, audio to see if there is more than one. I know that I have scanned some photos more than once, but I can't see VPX finding these duplicates with different filenames and sizes. BTW, finding duplicate files is a feature of Photo Manager.

Comments?

2. AI Source material sorting - Timeline

The AI should help me to sort my source material into a geographical and/or temporal sequence.

How, if there is no GPS information. BTW Photo Manager recognizes GPX info if in a photo and allows you to open the location in Google. I would like to see a way to extract GPS info from video files (GoPro), or at least get the starting point.

3. Mediapool

I would like more options in the Mediapool regarding my source material (sorting / categorization / full-screen use, material viewing and info, etc.)

Uumh, we have sorting, we can put the mediapool full-screen, we can preview the material, and we can get the info (properties). So, what is Categorization? Photo Manager does Categorization for images, video and audio files - you can tag the file with a person, place or thing and then get everything that to which a tag (category) has been applied. We used to have a link for Categorization with Photo Manager in MEP/VPX. Gone. If Magix upgraded Photo Manager to an appropriate name, like Media Manager, then I would understand doing this.

Is categorization the same as rating? VPX has a rating field in the Project Temp Folder - it doesn't work. You can't put in a rating and it doesn't take the rating that is in the EXIF of the file itself.

IN PLANNING

4. AI Source material sorting

The AI should help me sort my source material (images, videos, audio files).

???? This is what Photo Manager does, then you can import from there. You can rename files, folders, individually or by batch. Why not keep this with the program that does it best and just fix the link between VPX and Photo Manager?

5. AI Source material sorting - facial recognition

I would like to see AI image recognition that makes it possible to identify objects, places, people and fonts within an image or video.

I have a digitized video of 8mm film from the 60's with an elderly lady walking along the street somewhere. She must have been important as my sister took a whole roll of film on her. My sister doesn't remember who she was. So, will AI be able to tell me who and where? I highly doubt it.

Do I need to know which font is showing somewhere in a video? If I did, there are tools to do this.

Photo Manager has facial recognition, meaning that it can recognize what is a face. You can train it to recognize who, more or less, and categorize the person. This is 10-year old AI technology and Magix has done nothing with it since.

For me, I don't see adding these things to VPX itself, but I do see them in a new, improved Media (Photo) Manager that works as an add-on to VPX as it was intended to be. Magix just never marketed it as such. Photo Manager has a database and categorization. You can add comments and rating and extract them along with other file information from the database and print or export to html that opens in Word or Excel.

I can't see creating a database with or for VPX to handle what Magix is talking about. VPX is not a media management program.

Anyway, that is just part of my case for revamping an excellent product, Photo Manager to Media Manager. If you haven't used it, you would be amazed at what it can do.

OTHER FEEDBACK ITEMS

Feel free to comment the above and the other items In Consideration, Planning and Development.

Add anything that you would like to see added to VPX. Where should scarce resources best be used?

John CB

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Comments

Can-Dive wrote on 10/3/2024, 5:37 AM

@browj2

Hi John CB

Feedback - Development list
Thanks for confirming that there is nothing under development for both Photostory2025 and Movie Studio2025. I guess the Development of the "track order" option only pertains to VPX. Photostory and Movie Studio user may not require or desire this feature. Looking forward to seeing how this is implemented in VPX17 (I assume).

Full Screen Edit Feature

1. Missing Chevron

...However, if you know at least the shortcut for Brightness, Alt+shift+H, you can get back to the list of effects...

Excellent suggested workaround John CB, until they fix this issue.

2. Brightness/Contrast effect Freeze

I got this working at one stage and thought it had resolved itself but its back and I'm not sure how I triggered it. It seems to be intermittent. Do you have the same issue on your machine? Does the Brightness/Contrast window freeze in full screen mode on your computer?

3. Full screen Effect short cut Error

...Here is another trick. You can get the Media Pool Effects to overlay the full-screen view by using a shortcut. So, Alt+Shift+H will open Brightness/Contrast and this window works properly - you can move it around. However, when you select another effect, the window closes and you have to right-click, Edit video effects to get the other window back with the selected effect. Strange...

This is actually a different window compared to bringing up the effect with the right click so something is not quite right.

Also, If I go into full screen and use a short cut to get an effect I sometimes get the following error message and the system shuts down. So I'm not sure if keyboard short cuts in full screen mode was catered for.

SFACL and other sound editors
Thanks for the confirmation that only SF Audio Studio 12.6 works with VPX. You indicated that Samplitude works with VPX. There is actually a Humble Bundle offer on now that includes Samplitude Pro X7 as well as ACID Pro 10 Suite, Music Maker 2023 Premium along with some sound pools. They even threw in Movie Studio 2023 Suite!

https://www.humblebundle.com/software/music-creators-bundle-software?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_3_layout_type_threes_tile_index_2_c_musiccreatorsbundle_softwarebundle

So if Samplitude works with VPX, this is an excellent opportunity to obtain the software to determine if it suits your needs. I assume it can use the same VST's that came with SFACL4.

Photo Manager vs Proposed Features in VPX
I think the challenge for Magix Photo Manager is the competition. Serious photographers are probably using Adobe Lightroom along with the free Adobe Bridge. Adobe Bridge also reads video files. For the typical consumer, Google Photos or Windows Photo app are used. All the photos and short videos I take with my phone automatically load into Onedrive and is automatically sorted by the Photo program. I can even create Albums. Like most consumers, that meets my current needs.

John, while Magix may not be develop Photo Manager going forward, it still recognises the need for media asset management and is incorporating Photo Manager features (as you have highlighted) within its products. In the VPX Planning pipeline they have two projects; AI source material sorting and AI Face Recognition. So the development team is not ignoring the issue; it is being addressed.

browj2 wrote on 10/3/2024, 9:24 AM

@Can-Dive

Hi,

Humble Bundle and Samplitude Pro X7. Offhand, I would say no for use as the external audio editor as it doesn't have the Cleaning & Restoration Suite that comes with the Suite version. I really don't know what would come up for use as I don't have a base version on my computer anymore.

I think the challenge for Magix Photo Manager is the competition.

I don't see any competition as PM does photos, videos and audio - thus Media Manager. And, I doubt that Magix video users are going to subscribe to Adobe.

All the photos and short videos I take with my phone automatically load into Onedrive and is automatically sorted by the Photo program. I can even create Albums. Like most consumers, that meets my current needs.

Yes, but you can't categorize or add comments, etc. For you, this may be enough, but for many users, they need more.

With PM, you can import from external devices and the cloud (at least you could at one point). You can scan images making it easy to add comments and categories along the way.

If you are just taking some short video and photos, then creating a video and moving on, fine. But ,the media for many users likely comes from various sources, including scanned images, digitized video (8mm, S8, VHS, etc.), recorded audio cassettes, etc., that has piled up over the years. I have a few thousand scanned images with many more to go. Categorizing them is a chore made easy using PM. Creating videos from this is just one task.

The Albums created in PM are supposed to be able to be opened directly into the video editor.

In PM, you can do bulk file renaming.

PM has photo optimization tools - the basic for improving images. So for many users, this could be enough.

Images can be printed, with/without comments, index sheets, etc.

And more.

I can't see that Magix can duplicate the database features into the video editors.

Going back to Categorization in PhotoStory/VPX/MMS, I can see the temporary use of this for putting together the material for 1 to 5 projects using the Media Pool full screen, the viewer, and selecting material from many sources/folders and categorizing them. Then going to the timeline and selecting material from a category and emptying it once no longer required.

So, it's better than what we have, but it could be better. I still think that Magix is reinventing the wheel and that their resources could be better used by improving other editing features. A drawing tool for creating masks would be good, especially with the loss of Xara.

John CB