Kdenlive Paris sprint & LGM report

Before we start we would like to thank the KDE e.V. (travel and hosting support) and the Carrefour Numérique (workspace) for helping make this events happen.

Paris Sprint 2018

From the 25th to the 29th of April, 5 members of our team had a sprint in Paris to focus on the future of Kdenlive. And it was fantastic! We met for the first time in person, made friends and worked a lot! But let’s start with the beginning. We were warmly welcomed by Mathieu at the Carrefour Numérique, part of the Cité des Sciences in Paris.

On the first day after a brief introduction, the team started working on the vision of the project, defining objectives, discussing technical issues and schedules and by the end of the day came up with a roadmap (see below) with a clear set of short, mid and long term goals post the refactoring release.

One of the biggest changes proposed for the refactoring release is  the deprecation of hybrid clips, which means that now there is a strict clip structure in which you can’t move video clips to audio tracks and viceversa (see video below). Also a high priority list of tasks focused on stability (but with minor new features) was made for releasing the refactoring branch for the 18.08 release schedule which includes:

1. Make a stable release.
2. Don’t break compatibility with older versions.
3. Finish implementing strict mode.
4. Folder import. (New feature)
5. Sort effects + make translatable.
   
6. Speed control via Ctrl + resize. (New feature)
   
7. Loop clip in timeline Shift + resize. (New feature)

Besides all the planning and heavy bugfixing of the refactoring branch during the 4 days of the sprint. We also took steps towards improving our communication infrastructure by adding multilingual support to the website and started translation in French and Italian, defined fixed dates for the Kdenlive Cafés, created a bridged Telegram group with #kdenlive at IRC (also working on bridging it with Matrix) and a francophone Telegram group, and discussed a strategy for dealing with the bugtracker after the refactoring release.

We also had 2 public events:

• A meeting for people interested to help the project, which resulted in a nice contribution by Camille: a rewrite of the developer info in the wiki. We also received a patch adding the possibility to manage and download keyboard shortcut templates.
• A public presentation where we met several very enthusiasts users.