[Kdenlive-devel] My experience with Blender

[Gerhard Hübner]

After I found out that Blender has a dedicated video sequence editor, I
thought it is worth the effort to try making animatesd slide shows with
it.

The good news: it works, sort of, the GUI is not that bad. It is
possible to load pictures, stretch them to the desired sequence length,
insert per-picture and picture-to-picture transition effects, including
the one that is known elswhere as "Ken Burns", i.e. zooming and panning
in the picture...

The bad news: Blender downsamples every imported image to the selected
video resolution. When I zoom into an image using the transform effect,
Blender does NOT used the original image quality but just inflates the
pixels of the previously downsampled image!!! This ruins the whole
function and makes it practically useless. My big multi-megapixel-images
just get squeezed to nothing and then inflated into an ugly pixelated
mess. 

How sad, 10 hours of work wasted just because someone who coded this
function didn't understand the basic mathematics of scaling, viewports
and linear transformations...

So I ended up discarding yet another tool that looked nice at first but
failed due to some very simple things not correctly implemented. On the
list of failures are also:
- Jahshaka (spent several days to get it working, no hope)
- Cinelerra: Editing simply doesn't work, crashes and hangs frequently,
looks abandoned.
- Kino: solution looking for a problem
- Slcreator: nice idea to provide GUI frontend to DVD-Slideshow, but
loves crashing and wasting memory and is written in some Visual Basic
derivative that no one else wants to develop with... why didn't that guy
use python, perl or TCL?

Again, the mathematics and code are simple and Kdenlive looks like the
right place where to put it but is anyone still working on it or has it
been abandoned?


As long as the programming interface for filters in Kdenlive permitted
working on the full-res image and not the downsampled stuff, it would be
easy to avoid the above-mentioned problem.