[Kdenlive-devel] So I tried Cinelerra

[Gerhard Hübner]

Ok, here are my results trying the slideshow-with-ken-burns thing with
Cinelerra:

(Note: used the CV on Ubuntu Gutsy)

1. Images are imported as single frames. You need to zoom into the
timeline to an insanely low level, then stretch the image a bit, zoom
out, stretch again, zoom out again etc. etc. until you have the image
shown for about 10-20 seconds. This is already a waste of time. Default
should be 1 second.

2. The default compositor settings are such that a 100% crop, with the
size of the output video, of the original full-res image is taken. This
means that for each newly imported image, you can see only a very small
portion of it. Therefore, you have to tweak the camera settings in the
compositor before you see something that is closer to what you wanted
originally. Again, this is a waste of time. Default should be full
image. The general logic of the Compositor is programmer-friendly but
impractical to use.

3. Fading between images needs to be performed by setting Bezier curve
points for each track. Not as cumbersome as (1) and (2), but defining
each transition this way is also wasting a lot of time.

4. Setting keyframes works (sort of) but is invisible and impossible to
edit afterwards. Furthermore, keypoints cannot be set to the last frame
of a strip, the editor doesn't allow this but shows an empty frame. 

5. Rendering is an error-prone and unpredictable process. Worst what I
have ever seen.

So theoretically, Cinelerra CAN do what I wanted, but it doesn't support
a reasonable work flow. While I managed to achieve about 50%
Productivity with Blender (compared what could be done with Kdenlive
once the linear transformation would be available), it is near 1% with
Cinelerra. 

<sarcasm>
May be it is not that obvious that people with day time jobs want to get
stuff done in finite time.
</sarcasm>

Sorry, yet another failure.