From my observations on the forum, the greatest demand (by far) is for some sort of “more versatile fade” effect.
Specifically, one that has:
- Partial fade - fade to/from a level other than silence.
- Some fade shape options.
These are also the features that I find most useful.
As a “general purpose” fade effect, I think that it needs to be reasonably versatile, but still reasonably simple. Something close to one of the “Fade by dB” versions would I believe make a good compromise.
Although I am able to tweak my installed fade effect to provide almost any fade shape imaginable, 99% of the time I use preset fade shapes.
- Linear
- Log
- Equal Power
- Round
- Sine
I think that a limited selection of just these 5 fade shapes are likely to be adequate for the vast majority of users even without any “shape modifier” control.
As the “Amplify” and “Normalize” effect work in dB (rather than linear scale) I think that it would be sufficient for partial fades to be defined in dB rather than linear.
I don’t think that it would be necessary to have separate fade-in/fade-out versions as one plug-in could provide a drop-down option for fade-in or fade out.
The default could be “Fade In”, thus providing a balance against the “Pro Fade Out” effect.
The one other option that I think would be useful would be for the Fade-In/Out drop down to have options:
- Fade In
- Fade Out
- From Silence
- To silence
Options 3 and 4 provide a quick way to set two of the most commonly used fades and also allow “logarithmic” fades to or from silence.
(A true log fade will never actually reach silence, but hardware log taper faders get round this limitation by adding a short linear taper to silence at the bottom end of the slide.)
The “package” that I’m proposing is a “more versatile fade effect” (as described above) plus the “Pro Fade Out” effect, to replace “Cross Fade In” and “Cross Fade Out”.
Are there any feature that anyone would like to add or take away from the above specification?
Finally and most importantly - what will the “More Versatile Fade Effect” be called?