Gestural edits

Here’s how a multi-touch interface might work when refining edits. In these screenshots, fingertips are shown as semi-transparent elipses. When a fingertip is detected above the surface but not touching, it is shown as a semi-transparent circle. I’m using FCP screenshots, but this could also work in this way in Avid.

Firstly, you could select edits by tapping them directly. If you want to select more than one edit, you could hold a finger on a selected edit and tap the other edits:

The edits selected:

With edits selected, you can then ripple and roll using two fingers. In the example below, the left finger stays still and the right finger (on ’14 and 13 skin’) moves left and right to ripple the right-hand side of the edits. The software could show which side of the edit is changing as you drag the clips to the right:

If you want to move the left-hand sides of the edits you’d move your left finger and hold the right finger still.

If you wanted roll the edit, you could use a single finger to move the edits left or right:

If you wanted slip a clip, you could select the edits on each end of the clip:

The way you use your two fingers defines whether you do a slip or a slide. Which ‘rollers’ get highlighted show which kind of edit you are performing. If you hold an adjacent clip with one finger and move the finger in the middle of the clip, you get a slip edit (the clips before and after would stay the same, the content within the clip will change):

If you only use one finger to move the middle of the clip, you get a slide (the content within the clip will stay the same, it will move backwards or forwards within the timeline, modifying the clips before and after):

It doesn’t take too much to create gestures for other edits…