Refactoring Branch Feedback

[Jacob Kauffmann]

Hello,

In response to the call for testing, I created a video of myself trying out the new refactoring branch. It's a bit long, but interested parties can watch it here: https://nerdonthestreet.com/episode/tech/testing-kdenlive (or at https://youtu.be/cNLjoajFUUY if you would prefer YouTube.)

I recorded on Thursday night, so it's slightly outdated, but much of it should still be relevant. My issues mainly boiled down to:

- New A/V splitting workflow: I already knew this would be a big change for me, and I understand I'll have to adapt. However, there are a number of inconsistencies and quirks which are probably making this change more annoying than it needs to be. (For example, video clips magically turning into audio clips when moved to an audio track, even though you can't put audio clips in a video track.) I saw that you've already made an update to have the default number of audio and video tracks be equal, and that's a good start, but I think more usability testing could be done in this area as a whole. Anything that can be done to make it easier to drag things around with this new system, should be done, in my opinion.

- Performance issues: I'm not sure if it has to do with the AppImage format, but I'm getting noticeably lower performance in the refactoring version compared to the current version. For reference, I've got a 6th generation Core i7 processor and a current-generation flagship GPU, so I'm hoping the performance is more like what I'm used to by the time refactoring becomes stable. I've got no data to back this up, but it seems like some of the performance issues are caused by Kdenlive working really hard to keep audio and video clips locked together while moving them around, since we're doing the whole vertically-symmetrical automatic group moving instead of static grouping like the current version.

- Minor UI quirks: again, not sure what's caused by AppImage and what's caused by Kdenlive, but some context menu items are missing (while the corresponding features are still present), the "Split Audio" context menu item shows up in a lot of places where it shouldn't (do we need that any more since it's now always going to be split?), the right-click context menu now doesn't show up until I release the mouse button, etc. I'm also not too pleased with how the timeline tracks, clips, and waveforms look a lot clunkier now. Just because it's professional-grade doesn't mean it can't look nice; on the contrary, it's beginning to look like Cinelerra or something else from the 90's.

- Bugs & crashes: the "gain" effect isn't saving my input properly, it seems to be saving 1% of the entered value (e.g. if I type in 200%, it gets set to 2%.) Custom keyboard shortcuts for effects are not working for me. I had some very unexpected behavior when layering several audio clips on top of each other; sometimes, only the topmost (or bottommost) clip would sound while playing. I also had a decent number of crashes. I see that there's a version for "AppImage - Refactoring" in the bug tracker already, so I may try and report some of those issues over there if you want users to start doing that.

Hopefully this feedback is helpful, and if anyone has tips on how to deal with the big workflow change, I'd appreciate hearing them. Thanks to everyone who's working on this, I know you're working hard on it & I hope it turns out well.

- Jacob Kauffmann

P.S. Someone else mentioned something about an LTS branch. I just wanted to mention that back when you did the port to KF5 (and some other refactoring happening at the time), I downloaded the last pre-rewrite version from git and used that for 6-8 months while the actual "stable" branch had its issues worked out. I know that's not a great thing for development because it means less feedback, but if anyone else around here is (like me) concerned about the upcoming changes, I wanted to remind people that it's an option. I prefer to stay on the current version, but with the current state of things, I might end up doing the same thing I did last time.