[Kdenlive-devel] Google Summer of Code?

[Dan Dennedy]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Mads Bondo Dydensborg
<mads at dydensborg.dk> wrote:
> Torsdag 05 marts 2009 skrev Dan Dennedy:
>> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 3:13 AM, Jean-Michel Pouré <jm at poure.com> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 2009-03-05 at 11:17 +0100, Mads Bondo Dydensborg wrote:
>> >> write a synfig based title/animation clip creator/plugin
>> >
>> > That would be great.
>>
>> Uh, I do not understand. You can render a video or image sequence from
>> synfig and use that already. If you want to integrate the UI, it does
>> not make much sense since it uses GTK+.
>
> I definitively would not want to integrate the synfig-studio GUI. However, it

The hard part of supporting animation is a whole package that works
together - GUI, documented serialization format, and rendering engine.

> is my understanding that synfig on the library level is possibly to use, e.g.
> its render engine. So, my idea was to present a simplified UI that could be
> used to create animated titles, with simple blobs in, and let synfig do the

OK, but what is "simple blob in?"

> actual rendering...

I had already started looking into a rendering engine for SVG with
script-based rendering. One idea was to couple the Mozilla
SpiderMonkey with an SVG renderer like librsvg. The tricky thing there
would be to represent state and have random frame access. I was
wondering if webkit would be possible for this as well. However,
really, SVG 1.2 that includes the SMIL declarative animation module is
more interesting and powerful, but I am not aware of much progress on
this in the FOSS realm. Moreover, the lack of design tools is another
hurdle. I know some in the Inkscape team have been thinking about
this.
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Animation-(Timeline)

> I'll have to look more into it, the synfig homepage have changed somewhat
> since last time I looked at it (a while ago).

I am not opposed to using synfig as an engine. I just wanted to relay
how I have been thinking about this. It might be nice to have a single
module that can support simple stuff in the kdenlive UI as well as
fancier stuff designed in the best 2D animation tool we have at the
moment - synfig. OTOH, one ought to also consider the Qt Animation
Framework:
http://www.qtsoftware.com/products/appdev/add-on-products/catalog/4/Utilities/qtanimationframework/

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+-DRD-+