[Kdenlive-devel] transitions

[Jason Wood]

> From: Rolf Dubitzky [mailto:R.Dubitzky at Physik.Tu-Dresden.de]
> What I think of looks something like the attached pic. 

That's almost exactly how I envisaged it :-)
 
> Whatever it will look like in the end. There are some 
> important features we 
> should not miss:
> 
> - easy to see at which frame the effect starts/stops
> 
> - easy to see which tracks are actually involved in the effect.
> 
> - if the effect is a transition, it must be clearly visible if
>   the direction is the right one (A->B or B->A)
> 
> - easy to select the transition object.
>   if the effects is selected, the should be a dialog embedded
>   somewhere to change the transition parameters.
> 
> - easy to move/resize the transition, i.e. there need to be mouse
>   handles and/or the mouse cursor must indicate that the tarnsition
>   will be modified with the following mouse action.
> 
> - if possible, show which kind of effect (name)
>
> In the example I gave in the attached pic you can even modify 
> the effect if  you drag the red handles of the effect line. 
> This is possible with audio in MovieDVPro and I like the 
> feature pretty much, but it would be sufficient to 
> present such a line in a separate dialog in case the effect 
> is selected.

I think it should be possible either way - for quick edits it will be easier
to manage in the timeline. For complex transitions containing multiple
effect lines when we desire a higher level of control, having a seperate
dialog is more useful.

> And before we thnk about three track effects, there is 
> something much more important and maybe difficult. We need
> to think about how to visualize the audi part of the track.
> We need to visualize a transition there too. This is 
> seperate to the video transition. Also the cut might be at a 
> different place. A veary simple and common kind of cut is, to
> show video A and fade in sound from track B for a while. After
> a few seconds, switch the video from A to B to. That is a simple
> and powerfull way to soften rough cuts and I think it 
> would be nice to have this possibility in kdenlive.

I would assume that this problem goes away as soon as we can handle video
and sound seperately? I think handling sound as seperate tracks on the
timeline is the way to go - I cannot think of any better way to handle it
:-) Except that we might want to have the ability to treat a track as
Video/Audio (like we currently do) to simplify the timeline. However in this
case, I would assume that the transition of sound and video would be linked
together?

I think that one addition that should be made to the transition picture is
that there should not necessarily be only a single variable that changes
within a transition - if we assume an audio/visual track for the moment, and
a crossfade transition, video could have it's own crossfade 'red line', and
audio could have it's own crossfade line.

Cheers,
Jason