Enable Alley to work like Finder

[subset]

Ever since MacOS stopped supporting DXV files in its finder preview (hit spacebar to preview a video), it's become a lot slower for me to find good videos "on the fly" in my library. I'm often making visuals on short notice (or making them completely live), so I'm just not as fast as I used to be without the preview function.

To me, Alley is the tool that potentially can fill the gap. But until now, I haven't been able to use it for viewing files, because it doesn't let me quickly look through subfolders. I've enclosed an image of what it could look like if I had the capability to browse one folder-level deeper. A big part of this would be the ability to drag files from Alley into Resolume, which is not possible with the current version of Alley. Without the ability to drag, I would have to click 'show in finder', and then drag the file into Resolume, which would add many more clicks.

[He2neg]

Did you use the interal file browser in arena?
Do you know you can dubbleclick the videos to preview them without having them inside any deck?

Maybe ist some idea but still your idea also can work well....

[edwin]

We had a Quicklook plugin (the plug-in system for OSX that allows you to provide thumbnails for your own file formats) for this especially made at the moment Apple dropped Quicktime support, before they dropped Quicktime support the thumbnails and even a proper playing preview worked fine.

This Quicklook plug-in we made took care of the previews for .mov files on your Mac, thumbnails worked again and a preview (although not a playing one, because that was of course again not allowed by Apple) worked again.
And it worked quite well for a while. But then Apple decided you are not allowed to register a Quicklook plugin for the .mov extension anymore. So that broke the Thumbnail/Preview support again on OSX.

So we are constantly trying to find a way to get the thumbnails back, but it seems that at the moment we hit an obstacle we don't know how to overcome. Thumbnails could work again if we start using .dxv as an extension for our DXV files. But we are afraid that will cause more problems as other players won't recognise the extension.

@subset, we'll look at your proposal, we'll be spending some time on Alley the coming months so lets see if we can make the browsing of files/directories easier.

[subset]

@edwin – That's exciting! I don't know if this is the direction that you want to take with Alley, but it seems to me that it can do more than just being a converter. If Apple is making it impossible to provide a decent experience, it seems reasonable to abandon it, and focus on making Alley into a proper "video browser" instead of battling with macOS.

@He2neg – Yes, I know you can browse files within Arena, but it's super tedious. You have to double click to get a preview, and browsing through subfolders take additional clicks. It works, but it's about the same efficiency as using Finder with VLC.

[theLABVisuals]

@edwin – That's exciting! I don't know if this is the direction that you want to take with Alley, but it seems to me that it can do more than just being a converter. If Apple is making it impossible to provide a decent experience, it seems reasonable to abandon it, and focus on making Alley into a proper "video browser" instead of battling with macOS.

Works for me! +1

[francoe]

Never saw a propper video browser, and never was one.
I use an old version of adobe Bridge (the oldest working on mojave).
Yes, it's a sluggy adobe tool, but have a couple of things that I thiknk a Vj video browser needs:

-Ability to create presistent thumbnails caché.
On the fly and by folder/location. Export caché to folders.
-Label/Tag system
-Fast access to fav locations (as those on finder sidebar)
-Search among those cached/indexed locations.
-Drag&Drop to Arena, Ae, etc

I'm not pretending you build all that on Alley, but to put an eye on.

[SeanBannister]

francoe, are you using an old version of bridge because new ones don't work with DXV 3 files? What version? I just installed the latest Bridge and was surprised I can't work with DXV3. Really need a way to manage my DXV library... considering if I should look at using a different format.

[Arvol]

Thread is over 2 years old, so yeah, probably an older version
Are you on mac or pc? If you're on PC try using the following: https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/icaros.html

[SeanBannister]

Yeah I'm already using Icaros but wanted better management of files.

For anyone else finding this thread from Google, as it ranks high for "Adobe Bridge Resolume" you may like to follow this thread.