Dear Friends,

Kdenlive is constantly looking for contributors:

• Developers.


• Translators.


• Documentation writers.


• Tutorial makers.


• Bug reporters.

 

Check our contributor guide for more information:

http://kdenlive.org/contribution-manual

If you need more information, I will add it to the contributor manual.

To register, please answer this post and I will add the appropriate rights to your profile.

I will check this post from time to time. You can also contact me directly using mail or IM.

Kind regards,

Jean-Michel

I started working on the Jack Transport support,
check last post of http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/mission-jack-support-kdenlive-ubuntu-lucid-1004

I'll be happy to contribute on this (Jack Transport), but I'll also need some help from you
(mostly because I'm a python dev, and my C++ is ****).

Dear kdenlive team!

I would like to join as a developer.

I am a software developer with C/C++ skills and with some experience with video processing.

I am also an amateur movie maker since 2004. Since then, I had developed my own video editing system, which contained:
* mencoder hacked by myself, with some add-ons useful in movie editing, like:
- brightness/contrast/gamma curves
- selective colour correction (quite advanced - see below)
- white balance
- keyframe-based crop
- matte compositing (as in
- dissolve transition
- motion tracking (rather primitive)
* avisplit and avimerge
* avidemux2
* sox
* some simple command-line programs, e.g. for minor wav modifications like fading, and hacked avisplit which duplicated or decimated frames, to change speed of a clip
* a python script, which glued all above together. It took a table-like text file, which contained information for each clip:
- source avi file
- beginning/end frame number (and speed, if applicable)
- mencoder filters, which has to be applied for that clip

This solution worked for me. However, it was not very user-friendly; in the first place, it lacked a GUI (writing GUI was a daunting task for me). Moreover, it was kludgy in nature, mainly because of mencoder limitations. Mencoder was not designed to handle more than one track at once, so implementing such things as transitions or matte compositing required some weird workarounds (dumping frames to temporary files, etc.).

According to my selective colour correction: it was a filter, which could do different operations on hue and saturation on different colors. It could, for example, saturate all greens and blues without saturating reds and yellows; it could therefore greatly beautify the sky and plants, but not make faces red. It could also change hue of selected colour without affecting others, for example make all yellows green - very useful for making shots in autumn and making them look like it was summer (and leaves on trees still green). And it was trivial to make a sin-city-like imagery, i.e. b&w with one selected colour left.

Two years ago I discontinued that project, however, I hope I could contribute some of my past work to kdenlive/melt and, having experience, write more.

If you are interested in amateur movie making, please watch my last movie edited with that system:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxeewXQSOjs

I'm new to kdenlive, I have just installed it, and I'm exploring its features.

What I miss most (so far) is a lack of histograms and curves and inability to composite over a fuzzy mask (maybe I just don't know how to do it).

Some effects seems to be not actually working. For example, blue screen, mask0mate and transparency don't work for me, they just leave the clip unchanged. Others, like equaliz0r, apparently do something with the image, but have no control panel - no knobs, no slides, no drop-downs, just an empty panel. Is this because they are unfinished yet, or I did something wrong?

Kind regards,
Grzegorz Borowiak

I haven't had time to take a look into your movie yet but your description, especially for the color correction, is quite promising and developers are always welcome.
However if you want to port one of the plugins (of course one that is not yet available) be aware that Kdenlive uses the MLT framework, which takes care of the effects.
http://www.mltframework.org/twiki/bin/view/MLT/
MLT also uses the frei0r effect API:
http://frei0r.dyne.org/

And regarding your issue with to the blue screen and transparency effects: Make sure you use them together with a composite transition.
Also some effects do not have a control panel (including equaliz0r).

Just a suggestion.

I want to compile Kdenlive. After installing a bazillion packages I could not get it to work.

Making the process more automated and simpler would allow devs to more easily get involved with the sourcecode instead of losing interest through frustration.

What packages are you talking about?
If you just want to compile Kdenlive you only need some of the packages listed here: http://kdenlive.org/user-manual/downloading-and-installing-kdenlive/installing-source/installing-required-libraries (most of them are for ffmpeg)

With Ubuntu the "apt-get build-dep kdenlive" works I think (same for MLT and Frei0r). And the compilation instructions on the site are quite clear as well.

Compiling is always a bit of a problem anyway with all big applications.

If you have a problem you should give the specific details about it (error messages ? installed packages ? etc.)

well after a long time i eventually got it to compile.

Since I have kdenlive, mlt and ffmpeg already installed and mlt+ffmpeg are used by other applications I did not install the source to my /usr/. so I install mlt to a local folder on ~ since svn kdenlive requires the newer version.

cannot find how to point kdenlive to that mlt version. I ask on irc and get some vague responses- someone pastes a page of environment variables I have to set. I do those and compile kdenlive- i notice in the linking its linking against /usr/ anyway...whatever. I install this to a special directory on home also.

run kdenlive. click through the settings init wizard. after kdenlive just seg faults. give up.

I worked on several big projects >100k lines of code but this is silly- the readme/install has no info on switches or local install. there's no hand holding for setting up a compile.

I want to start hacking code not admin my computer and mess with switches/installing packages. I want to maybe write the odd plugin or two, see how MLT works or mess with kdenlive code. but it's incredibly frustrating to waste lots of time trying to setup all this when you just want to check it out.

so you're probably scaring off a lot of outliers like me who might've got suckered into contributing kdenlive more and more and end up doing heavy dev work.

I can not help with your problem but I suggest asking this question on our developer mailing-list. Hopefully someone can help you there.

Bug reporting is always helpful, especially if we can reproduce them ;) If you feel like learning C++, why not wait for a bug that does not sound too complicated and that you would like to work on. But as written in the initial post we are also happy with video tutorials, good feature requests, people helping to answer questions in the forums, and so on :)

I can provide long-term provide simplified Chinese translation.
Though my English is not good... ?(?_?)?
But I'm doing that! (^_~)-?
Now, 0.7.8 simplified Chinese translation has been completed, I have already announced in Ubuntu Chinese BBS, we are in the debug.
About on March 1 May submit the translation of document.

I would like to be a contributor, but not as a programmer, but as a tester. I want to improve the softwares ease of use by giving feedbacks and suggestions...

@mark1234:
If you think you can corner a bug please report it in our bugtracker.

I could make some video tutorials.