[Kdenlive-devel] Scripting

[Jason Wood]

Hi,

I want to throw a thought at the mailing list and see what bounces back :-)

With the latest versions of QT and KDE, it is very easy to make an application 
scriptable. I am starting to contemplate adding this ability to Kdenlive.

My thoughts are - it should be possible to make Kdenlive as scriptable as the 
gimp, Maya, etc. with reasonably little work. From this point of view, I am 
going to implement it at some point in the future, no matter what anybody 
thinks ;-) But probably not until after Kdenlive 0.3.0 has been released.

What I want to discuss is more what functionality should be exposed, and what 
kind of different uses can people think of in which scripting the Kdenlive 
interface would be useful?

Here are a couple of examples that I have thought of myself.

Example 1:

You have a number of clips, and you want to lay them out in a random order 
(perhaps you want a minute long list of random, second long clips to use as a 
special effect.) You could write a small script that picks a random clip from 
the project clip view, and appends a random second-long chunk of it to the 
end of track A. 

Example 2
You want to use a custom sine-wave pattern between two clips. Kdenlive does 
not (yet) support this kind of keyframe. You use a script to set up alpha 
channel keyframes on your specified clip to simulate a sinewave-type of 
change.

Example 3
You miss the fact that Kdenlive does not let you select all clips that are 
currently visble on the timeline (as in, actually visible on-screen). You 
write a script that gives you this extra tool. Undo/redo functionality would 
work with the new tool with no extra effort.

Example 4
You want to create a special effect consisting of hundreds of videos displayed 
on screen at the same time. The effect does not exist in Kdenlive, and would 
take hours to set up in the interface. You write a script to automate the 
process, and at the end of it you have a single clip on the timeline that 
embodies the special effect. (Now you've just got to render it ;-))

Any other ideas?

Cheers,
Jason

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