[Kdenlive-devel] Support for more clip types

[Brian Matherly]

Hi,

I've been inspired to add support in Kdenlive for more of the producers in MLT. Right now, you can make color clips and you can use the generator plugin to create a noise and count down clip. But MLT exposes some other producers: like the Frei0r test patterns. And I'd like to add some audio test tone synthesizers.

I've been researching this part of the Kdenlive code and I found that there are two ways that MLT producers are exposed: "clips" and "generators". My frist inclination was to make generators for all producers. But I don't care for the fact that you end up with another MLT file to manage with the project and that the generated clips can not be extended on the timeline by clicking and draging. It seems to me that it would be better if the clips were implemented like the color clip. But that would require more code in the clip manager - and I don't know how scalable that would be.

It would sure be nice if the clip manager supported a generic MLT wrapper architecture like the effects stack. That way, when new producers are added in MLT, Kdenlive could adopt them just by adding a new XML file.

I'm willing to put in some time to make the clip manager more generic. But I'd like to hear your thoughts on that first. If you aren't excited about having changsd made in there, then i would be content to just implement more generator plugins.

Thanks for your thoughts,

~Brian