[Kdenlive-devel] Support for more clip types

[Brian Matherly]

>>  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.
>> 
>> <SNIP>
> 
> in case you do not need this feature immediately you might want to
> have a look at the refactoring branch. There we have
> AbstractProjectClip (src/core/project/abstractprojectclip.h),
> AbstractClipPlugin and AbstractTimelineClip which can be subclassed
> for different types of clips/producers (See src/plugins/cliptypes).
> Currently the implementations of image (qimage/pixbuf) and video
> (avformat, should be renamed to av) are started. These two cannot be
> made more generic because of things like exif data or the requirement
> to have different base producers for different tracks (audio issues
> with avformat).
> 
> But especially all the "generators" which do not use an input file
> could probably be handled by one single clip type plugin. For example
> by making using XML files similar to the ones used for effect
> descriptions. Just as you proposed.
> What do you think?

Till,

Thanks for redirecting me to the refactor branch. Things have certainly changed there. And I think it will be easier to add more generators in the new code. Based on what I saw, I agree with you. I think we could make a new clip type called "producerclip" or something similar. It could provide configuration for all the simple MLT producers like noise, color and colorbars.The producer properties could be automatically exposed to the user by querying the MLT metadata. If the producer properties can't be extracted from the MLT metadata for some reason, then we could provide an XML override to allow the parameters to be described manually. 

I'm in no hurry. So I can wait for the refactor branch to be done. Do you have any idea when the refactor branch will be merged into master? Alternately, I could start hacking in the refactor branch. But I don't want to get in anybody's way.

Thanks,

~Brian