greetings,

any interest in participating in google summer of code 2011?
maybe we could decide in the forum what could be the proposals?

cheers

it could be a great opportunity for some improvements!!

what first comes to my mind is 32 bit video support, but that's a more of a MLT improvement.
of course there could be lots of kdenlive improvements also.

My suggestion would be "back to the core", focussing on the actual video editing. I am not using all of the filters and fancy stuff, I just like to have the video editing better. The GUI should respond way quicker than it does now and the "core business" of video editing shouldn't crash as often as it does now. Also I'd like to have less user friendlyness and more control, for instance, I'd like to have a user selectable and configurable deinterlacer, possibly more than one, to be inserted as a filter instead of being inserted implicitly and I never know when. Same for scaling, zooming, cropping etc. A bit like avidemux does. If you want zoom into a part of the video, insert a "crop" filter first and then a "resize" filter (if necessary). Everything is more explicit, and I like that, no hocus-pocus-behind-the-scenes.

to 1: This just does not make sense. Why should anyone want that?
Workaround to 3: This can be done by saving the cut as a .kdenlive file and using it in the original project.

3. Look for this thread for a similar request.
http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/new-workspace-window-cut-library

I see. Well, kdenlive itself does not use colour spaces at all — this is all in MLT. As far as I am informed, MLT tries to keep the number of conversions on a minimum (i.e. only converts when necessary). Conversions are necessary if, for example, you apply a frei0r filter that only supports RGB.

Regarding the other ideas, maybe you want to post them here as well if appropriate.

The problem with 1. is that there are a lot of filters especially in frei0r, and only a handful are available in more than one colorspace. MLT only converts to a different colorspace when the next filter requests something in a specific colorspace. So, you may suggest frei0r project SoC project to port thing to YCbCr, but some others are suggesting a port to floating point, 16-bit, or 32-bit images. Lots of work can be done there.

Regarding the configurable deinterlacer, that is already available by setting the deinterlace_method property on the consumer object. What happens today is that the sdl consumer for the monitors uses the xine "onefield" deinterlacer and when rendering the avformat consumer uses the "yadif" deinterlace. There is also a "linearblend" option. There is also a deinterlacer copied from ffmpeg that is used as a fallback when the xine plugin is not available (not dependent on libxine, uses code copied from xine) or by changing the prefix/share/mlt/core/loader.ini file.

As for manual control of when to deinterlace. Well, it could be possible, but people will often put it in the wrong order - like after scaling. But scaling is somewhat automatic as well to conform inputs to the project settings, which most people want anyways. The rules for the automatic deinterlacing are simple and do the correct thing the vast majority of the time. If the input is interlaced and the project/output is progressive, it is deinterlaced. Also, if something would cause vertical scaling, it requests deinterlace. Requiring more manual control would be a major change by requiring full manual control, which I believe most people do not need or want. And where you do want more control, you already can get it using Crop or Pan and Zoom. At the moment, there is no automatic cropping or zoom.

Yeah more or less what I "feared", I am not the target "audience" of kdenlive. My ideal editor would be very bare bones and focus on editing only and would to that perfectly. Then all of the rest, I'd happily apply using scripts using a.o. ffmpeg. Also I don't think a video editor is the best application to do transcoding as (a.o.) it typically runs on a desktop whilst transcoding you'd like to do on your "big" server. I don't think I want to install kdenlive on my server as it needs lots of GUI libraries (I don't even use kde...). I am not sure whether video playback performance using x11 over ip would be sufficient as well. So these are my considerations.