[Kdenlive-devel] Interested new developer and little patch

[Dan Dennedy]

2010/3/9 Hugh Tebby <hugh.tebby at gmail.com>:
> 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.

Welcome! Prepare for the journey down the rabbit's hole. :)

> 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 know this has been irksome for many.

> 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...

Isn't it all based on pre-0.7.x?  If so, maybe we should just get rid
of it for now and solicit updates for installing/downloading and
common problems sections.

> 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).

good idea.

> 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.

Resolution change might be doable if you scale positions or convert
effects that use positions to percentages.

> 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

I will try to take a closer look soon.

> 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.

You are confusing scene detection with separate video and audio clips
on the timeline. Scene detection is going to be difficult to
accomplish in the current architecture of things.

> 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

The composite transition has keyframable opacity to do a fade in/out
of a title or whatever is on top.

> out over another clip (can't have multiple transitions overlayed). Also all

Hmm, I believe I have done multiple transitions in the past, but I
know there are some issues.

> 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.

I believe the effects system in Kdenlive will need major rework to be
less tightly coupled to MLT. Also, MLT can do things like masking to
confine filters to regions defined by the alpha channel. Also, with a
bit more work in MLT, all filters could be connected to the motion
tracking ala AutoMask. Some filters can take a MLT producer (for
example, to define its alpha channel), and that would be good to make
possible. Maybe we plan while we wait until I get generic keyframing
done in MLT? Maybe some people can experiment with better UI ideas as
well like being to define rectangles directly on top of the preview
monitor instead of the little red rectangle widget. Eventually, that
could lead to shapes for defining masks.

> Thanks for reading me and I hope I can help out with the Kdenlive
> development.
>
> Cheers,
> Hugh
-- 
+-DRD-+