Viewing ISF and movie library without adding the media to a project
  • jasonbeyers
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    Posts: 125
    Joined: Mon Oct 08, 2018 7:16 am

    Viewing ISF and movie library without adding the media to a project

    by jasonbeyers » Sun Sep 27, 2020 7:11 am

    When I begin a new project, I often don't know what media I want to use until I see the media thumbnails. It would be great if there was an integrated ISF and movie library viewer within the app, with user-selectable paths to look in, with a button to add a particular media to your project.

    For Materials, Madmapper v4 has a great integrated media viewer, which makes it easy to scroll through your materials *before* adding one to your project. Madmapper got me into generative visuals and over these last 3 years I have accumulated and customized an insane number of ISFs -- over 2000 at this point, and each one has a use somewhere. I've been meticulous in saving thumbnails for all of them, so I can scroll through them within the app.

    My old approach of "add all ISFs to every project and prune the list later" worked fine when there were only a few hundred to work with. And the dev team has rolled out various performance improvements related to large media libraries & surface/fixture counts (also, big thanks to Garagecube for addressing the bulk-add issue on Windows with v4.0.1!). All wonderful improvements! But I realize I've only used large libraries within Madmapper because it's the only way I can view the thumbnails in one place.

    The performance issues that come with huge libraries (within a project) could be mostly avoided if there was a way to view ISF and movie libraries without actually adding them to a project -- just like the existing Material viewer. Maybe these could be tabs alongside the current Material one, for ISF, movies, images, etc. A complication would be telling the app where to look -- so maybe the "Workspace" section of the settings menu could have a multiple-selection field of paths to look in (just for this media viewer) aside from the main Madmapper workspace path.

    Given unlimited time, I would convert those thousands of ISFs to Materials, just so I can manage them cleanly within the app. But having an integrated solution for other media types would be a huge time saver and would allow for new workflows.

    Thanks for your consideration and big thanks for all the new features in v4!
    -Jason

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