[Kdenlive-devel] critique of 0.7.2.1

[Dan Dennedy]

On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 6:10 AM, aia8v <aia8v at virginia.edu> wrote:
> im not sure if this kind of feedback is wanted or if this is the right place
> to deliver it, but here are my thoughts on the newest version of kdenlive.

It is preferred to have very specific things in the Mantis bug
tracker, and please be sure to identify feature requests.

> have functional precedence and from my experience, volume control and fading
> are the two most common operations. i find these very hard to do in
> kdenlive.

I agree, and I am pretty sure there are things in our Mantis covering
these. I especially struggle when using the touchpad on a laptop to
adjust certain things.

> volume control and fading
>     -the way kdenlive adjusts clip volume is painful. i expect most people
> want to adjust the volume of an entire clip.

and/or track-level

>      this should be easy, like just dragging up and down on the clip with a
> modifier key maybe.

perhaps keep the one as is, but add this mouse operation where
afterward you can visibly see and numerically adjust the level in the
clip properties dialog? It kind of seems something so integral to a
clip and should not really require an explicit effect. no?

> the new version is extremely slow when rendering.
>        -even with no effect my clips play with some chop (720x640 at 30fps), i
> am using the automatic video driver (could there be a gl driver like mplayer has?)

we don't have a "gl driver." we use SDL, but a X server driver problem
could cause it. There are a lot of "it depends" and questions to ask
here, but try this:

$ inigo -profile square_ntsc your_video_clip

How does that compare? You can play a video file directly. Then, you
can put the video file into a kdenlive project with nothing else, and
test playing the .kdenlive file. The speed should be decent - not
quite mplayer level - but quite decent.

>        -also, the render-out functionality i thought was like in final cut
> or premier, to render transitions and what not to a
>         cache so playback is smooth.

Are you requesting a feature to render specific regions for smooth
preview and then have kdenlive dispose of it automatically when
something in the region changes? Yeah, this is actually rather
difficult and a lot of work, but it should be made a proper feature
request.

> video effects
>        - i think simple video effects (flip, color(enhance,adjust), slow-mo,
> crop/resize) should be easier to get to than the other ones.

This weekend, I have added crop, pan & zoom, and white balance (color
temperature). For the audience following latest changes, my white
balance stuff is pending and being put into frei0r. But let's look at
some specifics:
- flip: this is in Mirror. Is the problem that this is not obvious?
- color: there are all sorts of stuff here with the inclusion of
frei0r plugins and the pending White Balance effect for basic color
correction (pick neutral color using eyedropper). Moreover, these seem
simple and obvious to get to and use. Anything specific?
- Slow-mo: in the context menu and simple speed factor adjustment.
Anything specific? There are some advanced feature requests in Mantis
already for this area.

>        also premier has an awesome function that all settings on all effects
> are animatable(adjust with time). i dont know
>        how easy this would be to impliment but its very powerful.

This is in Mantis as a feature request, and it is rather difficult and
much work to make sure each effect works. Also, there are some effects
where if you could animate them, the results would fairly ugly due to
lacking sub-pixel position and rendering. However, I do expect to
start work on this in MLT, the engine of kdenlive, in 2009, but it
will take some time. Right now, there are just more stability bugs,
media format compatibility issues, and essential features to work on.

> render out
>     -the render out interface is awesome, but most of the videos it rendered
> did not work (couldnet even play in mplayer) i know
>     this is a complex issue and needs to be troubleshot before i can give
> you useful feedback. right now i just use uncrompressed
>     output and compress with ffmpeg.

hmm, that's strange and we do use the ffmpeg libs to render. I know we
have had problems with the transport stream output of HDV that was
recently improved as well as NTSC DV render bugs in the kdenlive
profiles that were fixed both in the last release (AVI) and just
recently (Raw DV). I have not had the luxury to test all the render
profiles yet.

>
> conclusion
>     kdenlive is awesome, and i love using it. unfortanatly there are some
> features which are very hard to use and these happen to
> be the most important features, at least for me. common  features in both

You are not alone. As the MLT dev (and former Kino lead dev), my main
mode until recently has been on stability and compatibility bug
triage. Just in the past few days, I have been addressing some of my
gripes, which I am confident are more common and fundamental rather
than advanced at this point.
-- 
+-DRD-+