There’s no doubt that implementation of lanes and comping has improved with the latest version. However I’m finding some of the fine detail is slowing me down. If this seems like nit-picking, it is, but when you make thousands of cuts, trims, moves etc in the course of a session anything which doesn’t work really well becomes a headache.
I often find there is a confusion of tools in the area of trimming, moving clips and moving end/start of clips. If you zoom into a clip and make the track tall it’s easier to see what’s happening. In doing this, I found a couple of oddities:
In lanes, selecting the clip to the right of a cut outlines the clip in red but it doesn’t show the little red square in the bottom left of the clip, which is the area which enables you to move the start of the clip. The area is there if you move the cursor over it, the cursor changes to the double-headed arrow, but the absence of the red square makes it harder to find the area, which is anyway very small. Oddly, selecting the clip to the left of a cut does show the square, and it also shows on the overall (top) lane of the track.
I really like the new behaviour in which hovering over a cut enables the cut to be moved. Again there is an oddity if there is any overlap of the two sides of the cut. If there is only a small overlap, the ‘move cut’ tool still appears, and it pulls the overlap back so that the two ends are together. This is useful. But if the overlap is greater than a small amount, the ‘move cut’ tool just doesn’t appear. If you don’t notice the cursor not changing to the ‘move cut’ tool, it’s very easy to slip the whole clip by mistake.
I’d love to see the cross-hatching overlap appearance to change (the old darker appearance was much better) but this overlap behaviour with the ‘move cut’ tool should ideally be the same as trimming the end of an overlapping clip, where it’s underneath the next clip - in that case, however long the overlap, clicking just to the left of the start of the top clip will bring the end of the underneath clip back.