I realize they were removed to simplify the GUI with the introduction of the new filtered panes, but now i am required to do a lot of extra clicking when all i want to do is quickly turn off a couple of groups, or switch off ‘suspended’ jobs etc.
What do other users feel about this? I just started using deadline6, so maybe this is something that you can get used to very fast and is better, but right now it kinda feels that we went from a ‘simple, efficient’ way to control what you see to something that’s a bit too clever, making it counter intuitive, and without the simple approach being available any more. Say, i am trying to show someone where his active jobs are, instead of just a couple of clicks on the filters to narrow down the search, i have to either create a new pane and manually set up all new filters, or edit my current pane’s filters in a bit of a convoluted way…
instead of unchecking suspended (2 clicks), now i go: .
click on arrow
click edit filters
click add filter
click dropdown for filter type
select status
click filter dropdown
select does not contain
enter “suspended” (9 keystrokes)
So from 2 mouse clicks, the process went to 7 mouse clicks and 9 keystrokes
Maybe a better approach would be to be able to still control filters with a GUI thats like what we had (group, pool, user, status filters), but they would actually be just a front-end to modding your pane filters automatically.
Yes, it can take a few more clicks to set up a filter, but they are so much more flexible than they were before. In addition, to save on future clicks, you can now “pin” filters that you will use over and over again. So I can quickly toggle between “My Active Jobs”, “All My Jobs”, “Joe’s 3D Jobs”, etc. The Monitor layout is also saved between sessions, so I could have all three of these filters active on three different job panels, all the time.
Yes, they are a big change from version 5, but we hope that once you’ve used them in production for a bit, you’ll wonder how you ever got by with the v5 filter system!
Yeah the panes are pretty useful, i think thats going to be a great help.
But as someone who spends a lot of time troubleshooting various people’s jobs, its not the best workflow. I get a jabber / email / phonecall saying something along the lines of “dude, Jon’s v5 of HA_000_250 is failing but v4 worked just fine, could you look at it”?
I normally just click turn on Jon’s jobs only to see if there is a pattern in his failures, then click “failed” only, notice that its only that one job of his that’s failing. So i disable failing and reenable complete to look at rendertimes of version 4. They seem consistent with v5’s completed frames, so then i filter back to both complete and failing to again see v5 and v4 at the same time, to check which frame v5 starts failing on, etc.
So those filters are tweaked a lot more often then just an initial setup and then reusing of the pre-existing panes.
First thing I did was create suspended/queued/rendering/failed filters. Maybe just include a few defaults that pretty much everyone will want? Save thousands of users from creating the exact same set of filters off the bat. If they don’t want them… they can delete them in 3 clicks.
Yep, i routinely use those as well. But in deadline 5, i could just have the state filter popup floating, and just do a single click. Now i will have to retype the states in those search boxes every time i change them. Not the best workflow :\
We talked about this for a bit internally, and we think we might have an idea on how we could make this work. We could add a toggle option to the Down Arrow menu to show/hide a “quick filter” panel along the left of the list. This panel would either use a “tool box” style or a tab control with tabs on the side to select between User, Status, Pool, etc. You would then have checkboxes for all the options that are available. The checkboxes would filter the list like it did in v5, but it would use the existing filtering system to do it.
The benefit to tying the quick filter panel to a specific list is that you could still have two jobs lists with different quick filters.
That sounds great! I would prefer the toolbox style (if its what i think it is ) as opposed to tabbed, as with tabs you cant have the different filter types visible at the same time. Thanks for considering this!
Looks like the built in toolbox control only supports one page at a time. Another option might be collapsible group boxes. We’ll play around with some ideas and see what works best.
I think it would be really great to have both quick filters and these fancy tab filters.
I can see power users making a great use of these ( oh snap regular expresion filters ? ) but I’'m afraid the less technicaly enclided artists are going to get lost before they reach the edit filter button.
Maybe exposing an icon for the edit/clone filters would be an idea ( the only icon in that area right now is the Graph icon ) I sure like the fancy Graph button, however I will be clicking EditFilters a lot more time than Graph so exposing it would be nice
) but I’'m afraid the less technicaly enclided artists are going to get lost before they reach the edit filter button.