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

[Jason Wood]

On Sunday 24 Aug 2003 9:51 pm, Reinhard Amersberger wrote:
> kdenlive-devel at lists.sourceforge.net schrieb am 24.08.03 10:35:21:
> > > 1. Import clips:
> > > here I would like to trim the clip(s) just inside the import dialog to
> > > finally import them into the project manager and/or directly to the
> > > timeline. So the clip preview should work ;-)
> >
> > Ok. After it had been trimmed, would you want it to appear in the clip
> > preview as *just* that section that you trimmed, or would you want the
> > entire clip to appear with in/outpoints at the position you had set?
>
> Good question!
> Originally I just thought about the second option, but having both would be
> the best ;-) The first one is sometimes called as SubClib (AFAIK used by
> avid e.g.).
>
> Another useful option I can think of is having the possibiloty to add
> _several_ I/O regions to a file. So, maybe another guy on another machine
> could create this regions and the video editor just have to open this
> prepared file in his editing suite to finally import this regions to the
> timeline ....

Ah, this sounds like a very exciting and useful idea :-)

More to the point, I bet it won't take that long to implement - before I start 
here is what I imagine for the base implementation :

- You add a clip to your project. 
- Select the clip, it appears in the clip monitor as usual.
- Set in and outpoints for the region/subclip that you want to define.
- Click the "make subclip" button. You have the chance to name the subclip, 
and it then appears in the project list as a sub-item of the clip you made it 
from (the project list would become a treeview instead of a flat list like it 
is at the moment.)
- Save the project and the subclips get saved/loaded with it.

I admit that this isn't the greatest implementation for several reasons :

1. subclips will always be shown relevant to the parent clip... but the parent 
clip could be a 30 minute chunk of library footage that contains many 
subclips that have no relation to each other.
2 The implementation does not allow you to define subclips in a 
project-independent way. 


Unfortunately, I know exactly how I want to solve this, and I'd love to start 
right now, except that project management/asset management is a long way down 
the list of important things needed for a video editor :-)

Basically, the idea is something like this :

All clips from any project are entered into a database. Exactly how thorough 
you want to be with this (from having dedicated people to entering clips, 
defining all sub clips and classifying all subclips, up to and including not 
running with a database at all) is up to you.

Every possible detail about a clip can be defined in the database. Things such 
as it's filename, the physical medium on which it was captured, the 
in/outpoints on the physical medium (if applicable/possible), whether or not 
the clip is currently on the hard disk, and which projects are using it.

Subclips also would have details - a lot of descriptive fields about the clip, 
such as if it was shot at night, or daytime; sunny or raining; who is in the 
clip, the nature of the footage (comedy, interview, outtake), etc. etc. etc.

Now, what does this give you? Well, a nice database you can query ;-)

Now, with some programmatic support, we can do things like this :

- See which clips on the hard drive are in use in the projects people are 
working on, and which are safe to delete to make space (for people with 
limited hard drive space).

- Decide that we want to add a shot of Big Ben, from the air, at night (but no 
clouds) in our current project, and find potential candidate clips in our 
library quickly. Of course, this would need an extensive library of clips to 
work well ;-) but on a simpler level, find all those clips of the interview 
we are editing where the interviewer is talking about Linux.

And a grand aim that I am unsure is technically possible :

- You have a copy of your project file, but a hardrive crash just took out all 
of the clips you were working on. You load the project up in Kdenlive, press 
a "retrieve clips" button, and it would provide a number of dialogs saying 
"now place the dv tape marked DV0001 - Linux Interview 1 into the camera and 
click ok", and at the end of the process (assuming you gave it all the tapes 
it asked for), it would have automagically cued up and recaptured all of the 
footage again to allow you to carry on the project where you left off.

Anyway, I'll stop there, since it could be several years before I feel it's 
the right time to implement all this stuff ;-)

Cheers,
Jason

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