I've found it very useful so far for manual focusing to use the capture window in Kdenlive running on my netbook with my dvcam connected by firewire and using the capture window, just to monitor, live preview not capture. I have a manual focus aid on the cam but find the netbook better, when I'm not 'running and gunning' as they say. :-)

But would it be possible to have an RGB Parade, Histogram and Lumascope to monitor a live camera connected by firewire?

The Histogram is the most important I think, as many cams have zebra patterns, including mine and they are always on but it is not best to rely on them when a judement call is required on what to exposure for, with the 'Expose To The Right' philosophy a near realtime histogram function in the capture window would be extremely useful.

This would provide a low cost, :-) mini version of something like Adobe OnLocation and even if users out there prefered to use an alternative NLE on Windows or Mac, a lightweight USB Kdenlive Live USB stick version to boot up to use as a basic camera monitoring solution in kdenlive, would make kdenlive an even more useful tool and wider user base.

There is also a free application called HDVDataMonitor, which can read certain data from the camera's firewire connection like the f stop and any gain the camera is adding, i don't know how much anyone is knowledgable about how that works but that would be another very useful feature for live monitoring.

I understand the motivation, but today the capture monitor uses ffplay. So, ffplay would need those types of filters, or MLT needs more testing of handling raw DV and MPEG2-TS on stdin (as dvgrab output is piped into ffplay currently). If we can use melt instead of ffplay, then we can attach these frei0r filters. A quick test shows it not working, so I will add this to my somewhat long MLT ToDo list.

Thanks for the detailed reply. Maybe one day. :-)

http://kdenlive.org/forum/what-vectorscope#comment-10421

You want this for the record monitor as well?