[Kdenlive-devel] Usability test (by me!)

[Jason Wood]

Hi,

The one thing I decided was very important to do to check the status of 
Kdenlive/piave was to, well, actually use it a little bit and see what I 
could do with it :-) So I took of my development hat for a while and replaced 
it with my fluffy vdeo editing cap (with matching directors chair) ;-)

Before I start, I would like to say that if other people can write their own 
experiences with kdenlive - and remember, it's the bad experiences that 
matter the most cos we ain't going to fix the good experiences! - then it 
would be much appreciated.

So, I have a number of video clips in raw dv *.avi format (they were captured 
on Windows by somebody else).

1. The first step I had was therefore converting them to rawdv - not too hard 
but not done via Kdenlive, I used Kino to do this. I missed the fact that 
there appears to be no way to batch-convert files to a new format, but then, 
that's not really what kino is there for.

Then it was onto editing.

I realised early on that some of the known missing pieces are very noticable 
when trying to do anything - and most of them are sound related. Here are the 
issues I came up against :

- The first thing was sound sync with the video. Rolf has already mentioned 
this is improved in the 0.3.0 branch of piave by using arts directly, but it 
is very annoying trying to watch back your movie and "mentally shift" the 
sound back to where it's supposed to be.

- I had the same shot filmed at two different camera angles. Syncing up the 
video/sound was relatively straight forward. But damn, the sound quality 
between the cameras was so different it was way too noticable! The real 
solution to this is to have video seperate to sound, so that one camera's 
sound (or an mp3/off/wav file) can be used throughout and the other video(s) 
simply displayed over the top.

- Because the cameras both had mono sound, the dv files were the same - 
functionality to take sound from either the left or right channel and use it 
for both channels is a must.

- On the back of this, I missed not being able to fade sound in/out :-)

- video crossfade - for the clips I was editing together, a simple crossfade 
effect would have been quite adequate to make the end result much better.

Things that would have been nice :

- Having sound images in Kdenlive so that you can visually see the 'beats' in 
music, or when somebody starts speaking.

- If piave crashes, it does take a minute or so before a connecion can be 
re-established. Some sort of rotation of port numbers so that a new port is 
tried each time should help remove this problem completely. This does not 
mean that we should stop bug-fixing though!!! :-)

General bugs I found (to be fixed for 0.2.4):

- Selecting clip in the timeline appears to not show in the clip monitor 
again.
- Resizing clips does not update workspace monitor.
- Spacer tool should be able to move clips around.

Things I liked :

- Being able to select in/outpoints works like a dream!
- The piave in the workspace monitor crashed once or twice , I did not lose my 
project! (There seems to be an issue with long timelines, piave inserts 
<message></message> tags which do not always make the end scenelist valid 
XML. I hope to look into this, since I want to rationalize the XML code in 
Kdenlive at least anyway.)
- The rendering was nice and fast, and came out exactly as it played during 
the edit.

The end result was not overly impressive, mainly due to the sound issues 
already mentioned.

As I said, I'd like to hear other people's views on the usability on 
Kdenlive/piave. Be harsh but fair! If you are not using Kdenlive to edit 
projects together, I would like to know what the most urgent reasons are! If 
you are using Kdenlive but find it limiting, I want to know what those 
reasons are!

Basically, I want to look at what functionality we should look to include in 
Kdenlive/paive 0.3.0 and beyond, but most importantly, which functionality 
needs to be implemented first ;-) 

I know that some of the points I have mentioned here are already being worked 
on or are finished in Piave 0.3.0 (such as avi file support?), but there are 
others that need work on both Kdnelive and piave (separate sound & video)

Right, I'll switch back to the developers hat. Please feel free to comment!

Cheers,
Jason

-- 
Jason Wood
Homepage : www.uchian.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk