[Kdenlive-devel] TalkOSS and Kdenlive

[Andrew Manson]

Hi everyone,

 I was chatting on the IRC channel Wednesday night with Alberto and got a
chance to a discuss proposal I have for the Kdenlive team with him. All and
all Alberto seemed like he liked the idea but urged me to bring the
discussion up on the mailing list, so that's why I'm here!

 I would call myself a KDE developer (even though I have not been developing
for a while now) and have worked quite extensively on the Marble Desktop
Globe project. Lately I have been working on a new project, apart from
development, that will need some help/collaboration from the Kdenlive team
and hopefully will end up with a mutually beneficial relationship between
Kdenlive and TalkOSS.

 The "big idea" is actually quite simple but has not yet been done quite
right by anyone else. Let me explain....

 We have many great Open Source Conferences around the world that are
informative, useful to the community and sometimes quite entertaining. A lot
of effort has been put into the organisation of the kind of events and at
some of them (sometimes only ones with bigger budgets) there has been some
effort put into recording the conferences. I have been to two of the larger
ones that have had these higher budget recordings but there has been
something lacking from these recordings and that has resulted in some pretty
poor quality videos being released sometimes up to 4 months later than the
conference. An example of such a video is currently up on my website
www.talkoss.com.

 My vision is to have professional people record these conferences, because
that professional edge will be noticed instantaneously in the quality of the
videos. Also I would like to have one place on the Internet where everyone
can come together and watch these videos without having to go to disparate
corners of the Internet to piece together an experience of a conference.
There needs to be no barrier to entry in either the quality or the
availability of the videos and I hope to be the man to give that to the
world, with a bit of help.

 This is where you guys come in. If I am planning to provide the world with
professional quality videos I need a professional quality editing suite to
edit them. I could invest in a professional suite like Adobe Final Cut pro
but this is a no-go for 2 reasons. Firstly I will be starting this venture
on a donations only basis to hopefully just break even and spending all of
the generous donations on licencing fees instead of putting it to good work
would seem criminal. Secondly, and this is much more important in my
opinion, I don't believe that it is inherently *right* to be in the business
of promoting open source and not be using open source tools for the entire
process. This probably shows up my feelings about open source quite strongly
but I a am a fanatic an I will always strive for what I believe in, and
never compromise on the important things.

Having made the decision to use open source tools I will inevitably be
compromising on the stability and feature set of the editing suite for what
I believe in, but I only see this as a short term problem. One of the things
that I mentioned to Alberto on Wednesday was that I really like the concept
of the Blender Foundation's "Project Peach" which most of you will know as
Big Buck Bunny. They set out to produce a professional quality short
animated film with blender and at any stumbling block where they needed a
particular feature or the stability of the core was not up to scratch they
had a team of developers to improve the blender software so that they could
get the job done. This was a very successful project and ended up in some
really exciting improvements being made to Blender and I don't see any
reason why we cannot recreate the same effect. The "big project" this time
will be TalkOSS.

This is enough for my introductory email. I will need to start some separate
discussions on what I feel we need to do, organisationally, to get this idea
off the ground but those should be discussion items and should be separate
from this email. And also, just to be clear, I'm not just coming around here
asking for you guys to develop things for me so that I can get TalkOSS off
the ground. I am instead offering my services as a developer and a heavy
user/tester but my focus will be more so using the tool instead of
developing new and exciting features that I won't need, in very much the
same way as the Big Buck Bunny crew did.

I'm sorry for the really long email but this is actually my first public
announcement of the TalkOSS project and I wanted it to be complete. Please
let me know what you all think of the idea and if you think we could work
together on this one.

Cheers,
Chris Manson  (a.k.a Andrew, Chris is my middle name ;)
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