Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Future Plans

This is my personal wish-list of PiTiVi development. This represents my goals for the next 4 months or so of development, assuming a lazy pace:
  1. Deprecate the Simple Timeline, or at least scale back it's scope so that changes to the simple timeline cannot do much damage in the advanced timeline.
  2. Add seeking previews during drag operations
  3. Rudimentary undo support
  4. Editing markers
  5. Still Images
  6. Still Image Sequences
  7. Design Undo/Redo framework
I'd really like to bring some new developers on board. If anyone wants to work on this stuff with me (particularly undo), I'll help you get up to speed on the code base.

The problem with the simple and advanced time-line is that the two UIs present different and incompatible abstractions to the user. For example, imagine that a user has spent countless hours tweaking the volume key-frames for a clip. What, then, happens if they switch to the simple time-line and move the clip's volume slider? Does it flatten the curve? What value does the volume slider display? The easiest solution to this problem is to drop the volume slider from the simple time-line (or at least disable it if key framing is enabled.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wy not get ride of the hole simple time line. I think nobody will us the simple time line if the advance is finessed. I think a simple time line is more something for Brasero to make simple DVD movies.

Anonymous said...

I simply agree: if the advanced timeline works well, why keep the simple one. Still, the 'advanced' timeline should be configurable enough, so that users can adopt their way of working. In avid for example I don't need to use keyframes for audio levels. I can simply adjust the audio mixer and that will adjust the level for the whole clip.

Anonymous said...

Hey, I just found pitiviti and I'm really interested. I started working on my own video editor in C++ about a year ago, but this one has a lot more potential, it appears. We should talk.

brandon lewis said...

I'm glad to hear that! Why don't you join the pitivi developer mailing list here. Introduce yourself, and we'll help you get started.

http://pitivi.org/wiki/Welcome_Developers#Mailing_lists

Anonymous said...

Well written article.