[Kdenlive-devel] relative paths in project files

[Alberto Villa]

On Monday 17 November 2008 16:02:11 Mads Bondo Dydensborg wrote:
> This might be inspirational? What kphotoalbum appears to do, is to scan all
> files below a certain path, and match against the size/md5 sum database
> that it has. This is very quick - it scans my image collection of about
> 18000 high resolution images in 20-30 seconds. If I should move things
> around, it would be slower, of course. Again, for inspiration: If we stored
> md5 sums of clips with other metadata in the project file, we could offer
> the user to search (a path/tree) for a clip, if it was missing. That way,
> you could move all your stuff somewhere else, open the project file, and
> have kdenlive look up all the clips again. Or something.

nice idea, but calculating the hash of an entire video clip would take... 
hours? i tried md5 on an 8 mb file: 40s...
maybe we could get the hash only of the first bytes of the file, but that 
sounds like a bad thing (if i then truncate the file i'll get a wrong match... 
and there's also the risk of collisions). i'm thinking about this, maybe it 
could work if we include the original file size in the hash, or something 
else...

> Another thing KPhotoAlbum does (or at least did once) is that it allows
> image collections on cdroms/moveable media that are not mounted to be
> "used": that is, it is still searchable, and so on. It just appears with a
> "placeholder" icon in the GUI. In Kdenlive that would amount to e.g. being
> able to move clips around in the timeline, edit titles, all that kind of
> stuff, without having access to the actual clips on disk at the moment. Of
> course, it would not work for render, even though one could envision a
> partial render of the available clips.

i can already edit projects with only placeholders in kdenlive: an old project 
of mine includes some .westley which refers to lost files, but kdenlive isn't 
aware of this and doesn't remove them... i think it could be easily done 
rethinking the "you're file cannot be found and will be removed" dialog
-- 
Alberto Villa <villa.alberto at gmail.com>