[Kdenlive-devel] relative paths in project files

[Alberto Villa]

On Friday 14 November 2008 14:19:45 jb wrote:
> The "project folder" stuff is not yet implemented. The idea was to have all
> files created by Kdenlive for your project saved in that folder (video and
> audio thumbnails, title files, captured files...). The project file would
> then be saved in that same folder.

nice idea! but what if i have a 7gb video file i do not want to import nor to 
slice (and ext3 doesn't hold more than 4gb... i had this problem and i had to 
use an ntfs partition -_-)? and what if i have shared files through a number 
of projects?
i think that adobe audition (sorry) solved this. it uses its session file 
parent folder as the project folder (but this is not important), and, when you 
import a file, asks if you want to move/copy it in that folder
i think this is the better way to do the thing...

> Having relative path means that all files added to the project should be in
> that same folder, which is not always practical since you often have your
> video rushes on external drives or on another disk than the one where you
> store your project file...

not always true. we can make use of ../ (ugly but useful... read below)

> Could you explain briefly what would be the use of the relative path
> feature ?

here's my case
i'm working (since kdenlive 0.5) to a series of videos for a society. i've 
already done 3 chapters, and here's my tree

society
society/chapter1
society/chapter1/audio
society/chapter1/video (stores captured videos and - old - virtual clips)
society/chapter1/images
society/chapter2
society/chapter2/audio
...
society/chapter3
...
society/resources (generic material)
society/resources/audio
...

project.kdenlive is stored in "chapterN" root dir, and imports all his stuff 
from audio/video/images... but i often use files from old projects 
("../chapterM/video/file"), and i always include some files from 
"../resources/video" or similar...
recently i moved my "society" folder from "/home" to "/home/projects" (just an 
example, actually it wasn't that easy), and everything broke. i could easily 
replace the paths with sed, but i'm going to archive last year's chapters on 
my home server...

however you're right, most users store video files on external disks, or 
somewhere not related to project folder... so... could we add this as optional 
(i know, optional is my favorite word today)?
something like "use relative path", better explained, obviously, i'm not an 
english speaker nor an interface expert; maybe automatically selected if 
making use of the project folder feature i described some lines ago

> My idea was to implement at some point a "package" feature that would copy
> all project files (rushes, temporary files and chached files) to a folder
> so that you can easily backup it...

i absolutely agree on this

regards
-- 
Alberto Villa <villa.alberto at gmail.com>