[Kdenlive-devel] Interested new developer and little patch

[Hugh Tebby]

Hi everyone,

I've been using Kdenlive and following closely it's development, and now at
last I've got myself a development environnement and I started tinkering
with the code.

To start simple I had a look at what little tweaking I coulf to in the
interface. I made a little patch that replaced the "render" and "generate
script"  dropdoanw list by two separate buttons in order to make the
interface clearer and less error-prone. See here :
http://www.kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=1489

I attached the patch to this mail. Could you have a look to see if this
could be including in the trunk ?


I'm not a great coder. I have a little experience with c++ and contributed a
bit to Inkscape, but it's my first time with qt, and I'm mor a php developer
(and no really that good anyway). But even little contributions can help, so
here I am.

One area I could help would be the bug tracker management (cleaning up a
bit, removing old reports, checking out bugs etc.). Another place is the
user forums. There are still quite a lot of unanswered posts and there a big
problem with spam.

Would it be possible to have the rights to delete posts in the forum (to
remove spam) and to modify Mantis reports ? I could also contribute in the
documentation area, so if I can get the right for that too...


Concerning the code, I was thinking of starting of with interface
enhancements (maybe in the rendering area, to have an simpler access to
ffmpeg parameters instead of simply modifying the command lines, like what
Avidemux or Open Shot have).

There are several other bugs/features I would like to help with, but I don't
think I'm anywhere near ready for that :

   - Proxy clips : like what Blender has for it's sequence. For each clip
   you can generate a proxy clip (in a proxy subfolder), which is basically a
   lower resolution/quality clip that will be used for editing and the original
   clips will seamlessly be used for rendering. Changing resolution might be
   tricky (problems with effects, maybe), but simply converting AVCHD to a
   different codec, maybe 36 Mbit/s DNxHD would make HD edting a breeze. It's
   doable now manually by converting all the clips, then modifying the
   .kdenlive file. A simple script could do the job, so it shouldn't be toot
   difficult to implement.



   - Audio Fade-outs and volume effects bug :
   http://www.kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=1493
   This is probably more MLT than Kdenlive, and I suppose it is a little bit
   tricky



   - Automatically split audio and video clips :
   http://www.kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=1494
   This would use dvgrab I suppose, I don't know how difficult that would
   be, but I suspect it's feasable.



   - Compositing : the composite transition is one of the features I really
   dislike with Kdenlive. Because of this you can't for instance have a title
   fade out over a clip, or have a title over a clip and have that clip fade
   out over another clip (can't have multiple transitions overlayed). Also all
   transparency effects, like transparent pngs or blue screen effect, need a
   composite transition, which is limiting and unintuitive. If compositing
   could be simply enabled or disabled for all clips (enabled by default), and
   if compositing was done with all tracks (so you can have a title over a
   transparent png over a clip with blue screen effect over a background clip),
   it would solve all problems.
   I'm fairly sure OpenShot works that way, so it's possible with MLT. But
   there it's really way beyond my knowledge of MLT and Kdenlive.


Thanks for reading me and I hope I can help out with the Kdenlive
development.

Cheers,
Hugh
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