Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Icons Needed

My refactoring of the UI is nearly complete, so I've started adding new features to PiTiVi. Today I got the Unlink/Relink features working. Normally audio and video clips are linked together. Now you can unlink them and manipulate them separately. Relink allows you to reconnect a source to it's mate if you Unlinked them by accident. I have a couple more features planned for the near future, including: "collapse", which eliminates gaps in the selection; and select-before and -after, which select all sources right or left of the currently selected source(s).

This means we'll need some artwork to help represent these features. I'm using stock icons for now, and as you can see, it's not the best fit. The razor tool is easily mistaken for the "cut to clipboard" command, and the it's not at all clear what on earth "connect" and "disconnect" do. Anyone interested?

Master List of Icons

Other things on the horizon include thumbnail previews for sources, and audio waveforms for audio files. After I get through that, I'll start working on a keyframe-curve for audio-volume.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Sorry, it's been a while

Good news! I'm now a Collabora employee, hired part-time to hack on PiTiVi. We have set a deadline for this coming April to finally have a usable release. It's rather ambitious, considering how long this project has been languishing, but I think we're finally in a position to really make some progress. Now that we have basic cutting and trimming, we're moving on to the more challenging features. The following is a list of the user-visible features we want to have working by this April.
  1. moving/trimming multiple items
  2. support for still images (along with zooming, croping, rotating and scaling)
  3. linking and unlinking clips
  4. multi-layer editing...
  5. ..which goes hand-in hand with audio mixing and video compositing...
  6. ...as well as basic video effects.
  7. undo/redo support
This is the big push, and unfortunately, it requires more back-end work. At least this time, I'll be able to help out with a good portion of it, since a few of the changes are based on my own ideas. The refactoring will enable the features listed above, as well as support some long-term goals:
  1. Multi-track editing (i.e. multiple named output channels)
  2. Subsequences and subcompositions
  3. Combining media media from multiple sources into a unified objects (syncing separate audio and video, for example, or combining video from multiple cameras into a single object)
  4. Converting between media types, like converting an audio stream to a video stream with a visualizer plugin.
  5. Pre-rendering and caching of data.
  6. Re-conforming a project between different resolutions, codecs, and container formats.
I have already started work on an improved UI framework, which is almost complete. When the existing interface is ported over to it, we'll be able to add new features more easily than at present.

We're also adding a new UI component: the property editor, which will allow the user to tweak per-object properties. This interface will also be extensible: modules and plugins can provide appropriate controls for a wide range of editing tasks, from chroma key to animation.

We're getting there, slowly but surely.