Jeff Sousa

Hi Kevin, thank you so much for creating this video in response to my question. The video clarifies things for me. My lowepost.com forum post was a little more whiny than I remembered...I guess I posted in a moment of frustration. I should clarify that I'm not actually trying to replicate my Resolve workflow in Scratch one-to-one. Rather, I'm noticing that things are very different, and I assume different for a reason, so I want to learn what are the benefits of doing things differently. The tray behavior, as explained in this video, is a good example of that.

My big takeaway from this video is that Scratch's tray is not analogous to the gallery in Resolve at all, really. In Resolve, the gallery is like a dropbox for freeze frames with associated grades. In Scratch, the tray is more like a custom filter for your timeline, where you create live links to actual shots. The thumbnails you see in the tray in Scratch are not stills. They're...well, they're the shots! I'm not a huge group grades guy, but I suppose that creating custom trays on a per scene basis (maybe after you've sorted the timeline to [shot name] in the construct page) would be a great way to get that group grade feel in Scratch.

I just finished grading my first feature in Scratch, and one behaviour that surprised me (and delighted me) was that, because what's in the tray isn't a freeze frame but rather a live link, when you do a split screen comparison for a client and press play, both "sides" of the split screen play. So when a client asks, hey, how does her skin tone in this scene at the end of the movie compare to at the beginning, I would invoke the tray, throw up a split screen image comparing a close-up at the start of the movie to the end, press play, and both sides of the split played back*. As opposed to in Resolve, when you compare playback of the scene you're currently grading against a gallery still, and that still remains frozen.

Your video also demystified the "copy and copy+" button on the tray for me. Actually I thought that button was meant for somehow adding the grade you're currently working on as a thumbnail to the tray, and I was confused about how that works and whether it was different than adding a shot ref. But after seeing your video, I realize that copying to the tray means "apply the current grade to whatever shot is selected in the tray." That's very cool. But maybe it should be called "Paste (down arrow)," since that's what's happening, no? When I think "copy," I think of adding something to a buffer. Not applying grades.

This video has triggered a few questions / possible feature suggestions:

-It would be great to have a full screen tray on a 2nd GUI monitor, along with scopes.
-Because the tray is often hidden, sometimes when you press "add shot ref" on the Tangent, you don't have any visual feedback that it worked (you don't see the thumbnail appear), and in fact, sometimes it didn't work, because I noticed you really need to have the specific tray highlighted before you press "add shot ref." If we could see the tray always on a second screen, this would be no problem. But barring that, it'd be good to have some kind of quick feedback, like seeing a thumbnail animate down into the tray, almost like when you minimize a window
-I really wish you could "alt-click" the thumbnails in a tray to "apply" their grades to the currently selected shot, in the exact same way you do when alt-clicking another shot in the filmstrip navigation
-I'm always accidentally deleting thumbnails from the tray. Here's what happens: I have the tray pulled up, and I'm navigating my timeline and applying grades as necessary. Then I realize, after applying a grade, hey, I don't want that particular layer from my saved grade on this shot, so I press DEL with that layer selected. Instead of deleting the layer, Scratch deletes the shot ref I had just pasted from. And pressing undo doesn't bring it back. So now I have to fish for that shot ref again, possibly from another construct (like if the movie was done in reels, or multiple deliverables of a commercial). Maybe a fix for this would be that you can only delete shot refs when you're in "Edit" mode in the tray?

*(Yes, this post has a footnote)...Feature request related to how cool it is that both sides of the "split" playback in real time when comparing shots...if the current shot is a longer shot (duration) and the shot you're splitting it against is short, Scratch will (understandably) play into the handles of that shorter shot. So during my session with the DP, we'd end up seeing images of video village, craftie, the camera pointing at the ground, etc., and the DP and director were confused and alarmed. I think it'd be great if Scratch could limit the playback to only the range used in edit. And just loop it. Kind of like how you can set a matte to loop if it isn't long enough to cover the shot

Again, thank you so much for this video response to my question.