Zeitline - a Timeline Editor Tool

What we have here is something quite useful when sequencing media of all kind for playback.
Zeitline in this shape and form is composed out of an Asset Management Area, a Sequence Timeline, a Clip Options Section and a Image and Audio Playback.

First, after opening the attached file, go into /zeitline, right-click onto editor and select “view” from the dropdown menu. You should see an editor just like this:

On the right-side is the Asset Manager, then you have the Sequence Timeline below the Clip Options and the Sequence Options.

Start with right-clicking into the free area in the Asset Manager and create a new Folder:

AddFolder.png

Now drag some movie files onto the new Folder. The files will be added to the list and can now be dragged onto the Timeline:

DragAsset.png

At this point you can already see the movie by scrubbing the Timeline to the clip. The output is at /zeitline/null1 (the output of /zeitline/composite)

ScrubTimeline.png

If your movie asset has audio you will hear the audio playback as well.

By selecting the clip on the timeline some parameters in the Clip Options part of the interface become available for editing and/or simple keyframing.

Scrub to the point in the clip were you want to add a keyframe, make sure that the editor timeline is paused and click the “add keyframe” button on the right side of the parameter

Now change the parameter, for example Scale, and see the clip being scaled in the output. You can also change all keyframes of that parameter by clicking the “all keyframes” button

You can jump through all your keyframes via the “next” and “previous keyframe” buttons.

PreviousKeyframe.png

NextKeyframe.png

To edit the animation channels in the TouchDesigner Animation Editor, click the “Open Animation Editor” Button.

You can drag and reposition clips in the Sequence Timeline via mouse or arrow keys on your keyboard.

This environment holds a lot more possibilities with not only being able to sequence movies or audio but also generative components which are build after a certain architecture. Included in this file are 3 sample components which you can find in /zeitline, they are the DefaultComp, TextComp and AnimationComp. DefaultComp is the basis were you can start integrating your own networks. Main parts are the defaultchannels Table DAT were you can specify the default channels which should show up in the Clip Options part of the interface as well as the TOP Table DAT which is where you specify the name of the node which should be displayed inthe output. Look at the TextComp and AnimationComp examples to understand more about how extra channels can be used to animate the component.

Please as usual let me know about your experience with this tool. I would be very happy to assist with problems and improvements.
zeitline.4.toe (543 KB)

Wow Markus! You are on fire, I can’t wait to dig into this. These new components are incredibly inspiring!

:slight_smile:

Yeah! Great feature…

But i have troubles to place music(mp3 or waves) into timeline, i don’t hear anything… How to handle with music in the right way?

Hello
this addons seems to be very interesting, although I have so many errors loading it into 31740. Is there any new Version?

yea… also this doesn’t appear to be working in the latest build of 88. lots of script errors, functionality is broken in many places.

Hi,

I’m not sure when I’ll come around to update/rebuild this project. It’s an 077 experiment that has some interesting ideas on how to setup a system which plays different kind of content on different layers. So maybe it can still be seen as an inspiration for some future development.

Cheers
Markus

1 Like