Some things that seem to be harder (and more confusing) than they need to be

[wijnen]

I have V1 as a background track. In V2 is a green screen recording which is overlayed on it using a blend compositor with the type set to normal. V3 is some annotation which is mostly transparent. If I set the target track to V2 (which is what it picks by default), I see only the annotations and nothing "behind" it. I saw on YouTube that I'm not supposed to do that, I should instead set it to target V1. If that is always the case, that should be the default setting.

Anyway, when targeting V1, the output is my recording (V2) with the annotations on it (V3), but no background (V1). I don't understand what's happening.

A workaround seems to be to set the blend mode for V3 to "screen". That does mess up the colors of the annotations though. I suppose I could try to compensate that by modifying the media file, but that seems like something I shouldn't need to do for such a common operation.

What am I missing? How can I do a simple stack of more than two layers with some transparency?

[wijnen]

I have probably found the problem. I had rendered the annotations in Blender into mkv, without transparency. So that's not flowblade's fault. I'm now rerendering into webm. I'll report back when it's done.

Anyway, another thing that seems counter intuitive to me: I had to reverse V2 and V3, because they were in the opposite order of what I expected (V2 was on top of V3). Since the stack is visually on screen as V3 > V2 > V1, it makes no sense to me that it actually behaves as V2 > V3 > V1. But maybe this is because I had to use the screen blend mode? I'll see about that once the render is done.

Also, is there an easy way to move clips from one track to another, including their compositors? V2 (now V3) consisted of many segments with transitions and it took me a lot of work to just move them to a different track. I had expected that this would be possible with a block select and move operation, but instead I had to move every clip individually, and delete and recreate every compositor. Is there no easier way?

Finally, I found that the limitation of only allowing V1 as the parent clip was not useful for me. V2 (now V3) is the track with all the video segments; V1 is just the background. I want my audio tracks to have their video segment as a parent, so I don't accidentally move them out of sync. Is my workflow wrong, or is the limitation (which I understood is only there to incentivize a good workflow) not right for this use case?

[wijnen]

Yes, that was the problem. So I'll change this issue into a request for some things I encountered during this "incident". Most violate POLA.

1. There does not seem to be a reason to ever target another video track than V1 for a compositor. This means that at the very least, V1 should be the default target when creating a new compositor, but even better (if indeed there isn't a use case for it), remove the target altogether and automatically target V1.
2. Due to this system, the result is a stack with V1 at the bottom, and all the other tracks in reverse order. If you have 4 tracks, the z-order is V2 > V3 > V4 > V1. This is very counterintuitive.
3. Moving clips does not move their compositors, which makes no sense. You end up with compositors that need to be resynced. This should happen automatically when the clip is moved.
4. Moving a clip to a different track should also be easy. It seems that right now, after moving the clip, the old compositor must be deleted and then a new one must be created. And then it must be set up, which is very annoying if you need to do it multiple times.
5. Moving multiple clips from one track to another, to make room for something in the stack that you didn't plan for (or because you didn't expect the stack to be organized as it is) should be trivial. Instead, it's a lot of work.

Finally, it's very well possible that I'm just not understanding how things are supposed to work in Flowblade. I'm used to Blender's video sequence editor, and Flowblade is obviously expecting a different workflow. If the things I'm trying to do can be easily achieved in a way that Flowblade expects, please point me to relevant documentation about the recommended workflow.