Starting with Premiere Pro (Beta) version 25.0, build 32, all clips in the timeline have rounded corners!
As part of the New Spectrum UI updates, we are now adding rounded corners to all of the clips in the timeline UI. Rounded corners are easier to look at all day long, require less cognitive load to parse and understand, make it easier to see the boundaries between clips, and are just plain friendlier! There is a lot of psychology behind rounded corners. Just look at any object within sight right now, and you will start to see rounded corners everywhere.
Here are a few interesting reads on Medium that explain the concept rather well.
Rounded edges are “friendlier”
The human brain is conditioned to process sharp objects as potentially harmful and dangerous. A human neuroimaging study has shown that it is natural behaviour to lean towards objects with curved contours compared to sharper objects.
(Benjamin Tey, The current obsession with rounded edges in user interfaces)
The Effect
A complete lack of sharp edges and sudden transitions eradicates the manufactured feel that we’re so used to in mass-produced goods. Instead of reminding us of industrial supply chains, automobile production, and chemical laboratories, these softer shapes evoke succulents, pine trees, and rocks that have tumbled through mountain streams. There’s an organic quality that just feels healthy and warm.
(Arthur Van Siclen, Rounded corners in the Apple Ecosystem)
The radius will reduce as the clip gets very small to avoid the timeline looking too “bubbly” and there is a threshold width below which clips will revert to 90° angles entirely. We have tested with very large timelines and we are confident in our settings, but we want to know what you think. We encourage you to post screenshots of your timeline if you wish.
We want to know what you think. Please join the conversation below.
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Has the radius of the rounded corners become much smaller in the latest release (Beta 25.1.0x18)?
Continuing on from the complaints about precise editing that some people are airing, what I find REALLY annoying is this:
I'm dragging the dark pink clip back to snap to the end of the blue clip, and the highlighing of the dark pink clip creates a dark line between the blue clip and the selected dark pink clip. This looks exactly the same as a single-frame gap if the timeline is zoomed out. Please get rid of this outline! I do not need a line around a clip I have selected; its darker colour already shows that it's selected (maybe not if you're using the weird and silly VERY dark labels theme that was introduced a few months ago - if this theme is enabled, then highlighting the selected clip by making it lighter would be far better than drawing a line around it).
Cut points between some label colours when a track is completely minimised seems to be next to impossible to see currently. (has been for a few builds but this is 25.1.0.55) (0x51B858 is the worst in my current setup).
I like the potential idea of clips next to each other not rounding, but we still need to be able to see where one clip ends and the next begins, and a faint white outline just isn't visable enough, especially once you zoom out a notch or two
as soon as you increase the track height it shows the cutpoint like normal
It does seem, that with each release of the beta version, the rounded corners get progressively smaller, so on this latest release, the "rounded corner problem" has almost gone away completely! It also looks like those massive "1 frame of misleading nothingness" gaps between clips that in reality have no gaps between them at all has been removed (see this monstrosity from Adobe's first version of this rounded corners version):
...so now we have this neat, almost-squared-corners, no-silly-gaps version (very similar to how it looked years before The Cornergate Debacle raised its ugly, rounded head!):
At last, some good news in this lunatic world!
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