Hi!

I wanted to go for more of a "commercial" style video, resulting in a simple and less detail-heavy video.
Initially the plan was to go with a blender render, but it became quite obvious that blender does not have the text placement and animation effects that I wanted (atleast, not in a simple and easy manner).
So i simplified it by making each text frame in Inkscape and then timed them to the music in kdenlive.

There's no backgrounds or associated images shown with the text because the frames are short-lived and it'd look jarring to the viewer to have application windows popping up beside the text.

Long story short, here's the video in it's current form
https://youtu.be/rsdlE97Vm8g

Music is taken from zero-project under the CC-BY 4.0 license: https://zero-project.gr/music/tracks/infinity/

All the project files are present at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1n7i4J14AlFDA42kBXw9idTaSXq58UErY and are under CC-BY 4.0.


================== EDIT (2020-02-15) ==================
Version 2 : https://youtu.be/XxIQ53Y7ayA
Project files at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1w5JHIvGZ6ncYQn9j4MnUU0FAf6XzIi-A

- The Krita timelapse is by David Revoy (CC-BY-SA) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJZ9eD8p5co
- The KDE Connect videos are from (CC-BY-SA) https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/w ... 4393be4b44. The assets were taken from at https://share.kde.org/s/syBwRjeWpx6g6Ta ... mo%20Video

Hi! I'm not a judge or anything, but I wanted to give some personal feedback.
- Initial Plasma description, with constantly changing sentences: I really really like this one. It's very simple, effective, in sync with the music, and it works really well in explaining what you'd expect to do with plasma. +1 on that!
- Transition from "Plasma" to the plasma wallpaper by ideally rotating the camera: I feel that this looks a bit wrong, and maybe I would make it slightly faster. I think that my feeling is due to the unnatural behavior of the text stretching before the eye understands it's rotating.
- 3D Panel and clock composing the screenshot: I also quite like this animation, although I have some doubts: why does the ice cold wallpaper look darker than usual? The panel and clock are also quite dark, I would suggest making them a bit more white. They're also very flat: I think giving them a bit of width could improve them. Also, the background could be some light gradient of gray rather than plain white. I don't know how you made the animation but if it's possible, since the panel in Plasma is 10% transparent with blur, it could be nice to show that off giving the 3D panel a bit of transparency with blur behind it. These are a lot of things, but that's because I really like that animation, and it could really become a strong point of the video.
- At 00:30s, clicking on the notification button is a cool idea to show, but a) the mouse cursor should move more directly to the button, I'd suggest taking that video again and maybe speeding it up (you can use notify-send to fake the notification), and b) Discover took too many frames to load! That's definitively a discover issue, but if you could find a way to make Discover appear immediately it would definitively be better
- During the rest of the video, you always use fullscreen applications. I would suggest trying to avoid fullscreen as it might feel a bit claustrophobic.
- The showcase of powerful applications is pretty good!
- At 1:17, the video gets darker really fast, why is that!
- Final get plasma links: I would suggest using kde.org/plasma-desktop and kde.org/distributions instead of specific distros and community.kde.org/Distributions.
- The music is great, really fits with the video

niccolove wrote:- Transition from "Plasma" to the plasma wallpaper by ideally rotating the camera: I feel that this looks a bit wrong, and maybe I would make it slightly faster. I think that my feeling is due to the unnatural behavior of the text stretching before the eye understands it's rotating.
- 3D Panel and clock composing the screenshot: I also quite like this animation, although I have some doubts: why does the ice cold wallpaper look darker than usual? The panel and clock are also quite dark, I would suggest making them a bit more white. They're also very flat: I think giving them a bit of width could improve them. Also, the background could be some light gradient of gray rather than plain white. I don't know how you made the animation but if it's possible, since the panel in Plasma is 10% transparent with blur, it could be nice to show that off giving the 3D panel a bit of transparency with blur behind it. These are a lot of things, but that's because I really like that animation, and it could really become a strong point of the video.

The unnatural text behavior is from kdenlive's transform effect. I am working on making it a part of the 3d render itself without any noticeable glitches(since the text part is completely done with Inkscape+Kdenlive, and the animation is done with blender).
The animation itself will also get improved. As you pointed out, there's the blur effect plus I want the clock to be exploded further. The animation is too stiff at the moment as well, so I will look into the animation curves for it. Maybe I'll slow down the reveal a bit...
I'll look at the lighting, perhaps a very light vignette would look better?

niccolove wrote:- At 00:30s, clicking on the notification button is a cool idea to show, but a) the mouse cursor should move more directly to the button, I'd suggest taking that video again and maybe speeding it up (you can use notify-send to fake the notification), and b) Discover took too many frames to load! That's definitively a discover issue, but if you could find a way to make Discover appear immediately it would definitively be better

I was looking at some macro recorders to have consistent mouse movement in some parts of the video, so I will take that into account.
I could "speed up" Discover by speeding up the part where it's loading.

niccolove wrote:- During the rest of the video, you always use fullscreen applications. I would suggest trying to avoid fullscreen as it might feel a bit claustrophobic.

I will see what I can do to make it feel more natural. I don't think think the pro style applications should be shown in windowed but I will take a look at the others.

niccolove wrote:- At 1:17, the video gets darker really fast, why is that!

Thanks for noticing this, I'll take a look at it.

niccolove wrote:- Final get plasma links: I would suggest using kde.org/plasma-desktop and kde.org/distributions instead of specific distros and community.kde.org/Distributions.

I wanted to show some distros as a recommendation, so maybe I'll show the 5 distros listed on kde.org/distributions and have kde.org/plasma-desktop under "Learn More"?
It would look a bit empty without any distros.

niccolove wrote:- The music is great, really fits with the video

Haha, it's actually the other way around: I designed the video so it'd fit with the music. It's not completely there yet, according to what I had in mind, but I'll try to make it as close as I can.
Thanks for the feedback.

Hello pkd,

Paul here from the panel of judges.

We have decided to extend the deadline for submissions to the Plasma and Applications video competition until the 20th of February. The reason is we have not received enough submissions with enough variety of styles.

We will be publishing shortly an article from the judges in which they explain what they would like to see in the submissions, along with advice and links to resources that will make creating an interesting video easier.

We appreciate your submission and hope the new deadline allows you to create something even more compelling that will help us promote KDE Plasma and its applications.

Paul

Just wanted to give a quick update.

After going through the article at https://dot.kde.org/2020/01/18/so-you-want-make-kde-video, Farid Abdelnour's suggestion of the Blender addon Animation Nodes caught my eye. While I'm not sure if I can use it to have very minor transitions from one text line to another(if you watch Apple's "Don't Blink" video, there is some slight movement as the text changes), I will look into it and see if I can improve the video further.

On the 3d exploded part of the video:
- the color issues with the wallpaper, clock, panel was due to Blender's "Filmic" color management mode
- the clock and panel are now slightly translucent
- I tested out a complete exploded view(even the ticks on the clock and the hands) but since the clip occupies such a short portion of the video, it just doesn't look good at all

While I won't be able to work on the video for another 1-2 weeks, I'm also considering a switch back to Blender 2.79 for the "Blender Internal" renderer since it's much faster for me(a lot of time was wasted on the preview renders with cycles).

Version 2 is out at https://youtu.be/XxIQ53Y7ayA

- Switched to Plasma 5.18 and the new wallpaper
- Replaced KDevelop with KDE Connect
- The 3d bit is now using a carousel animation
- The screen recordings are all 1080p now
- The Krita timelapse is taken from David Revoy (CC-BY-SA) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJZ9eD8p5co
- The KDE Connect videos are from (CC-BY-SA) https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/w ... 4393be4b44. The assets are at https://share.kde.org/s/syBwRjeWpx6g6Ta ... mo%20Video

Assets are at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1w5JHI ... FAf6XzIi-A
The "Animation" directory just contains the RGBA PNG output of the 3d animation, so I did not upload it.

Great work!