[PiTiVi] Progress Report, Jul 23 2007

[Brandon Lewis <brandon_lewis berkeley edu>]

GUADEC was awesome. Thanks, everyone, for a super experience. It was 
really good to meet all of you and begin matching names to faces. Not 
only that, but I won a book on GTK+ which will make some of this UI work 
more well-informed.

We're getting ready to make a release soon, documenting the progress on 
PiTiVi. In the last week I have added support for changing volume on a 
per-clip basis, fixed some UI bugs, and added a cancel button to the 
editing widget. I also drew up a UI mockup for a Jog/Shuttle widget that 
would replace the gtk.HScale where it is being used for seeking. I've 
decided to wait for comments on it from users on the PiTiVi mailing list 
before implementing it.

Meanwhile Edward has been making the advanced UI more functional. There 
are essentially two big areas that need to be worked on: effects, and 
file support.

Yesterday, I hit on the idea of developing a PiTiVi example clip for the 
purpose of testing and demonstrating PiTiVi. The idea is to create a 
short 10 to 30 second sequence that will demonstrate PiTiVi's abilities.
We'd map out the story in advance on the mailing list (community 
contributions would be welcome, of course), and then over time shoot the 
story and upload the source material to the website, along with a rough 
cut done with PiTiVi in it's current state. As PiTiVi becomes more 
featurefull, we'd upload more refined versions of the clip. The clip 
would also double as a tutorial project for introducing users to PiTiVi. 
The trick, of course, is coming up with something complex enough to 
demonstrate all of PiTiVi's features that will fit in a 30 
seconds-or-less format.

Effects and Transitions

	This is a relatively straightforward UI problem, but there's some 
back-end code which needs to be written that will take most of the time. 
There's some bugginess in the SimpleTimeline with respect to  child 
widgets that have variable aspect ratios that will have to be corrected 
as well.

File Loading and Saving.

	This is a big chunk of work. We want to design a pluggable interface 
for file loading and saving, and a file file format. This has to be done 
carefully, with an eye towards future expansion.