Hi! I’m Akhil K G and for this year’s GSoC I aim to rewrite the titler tool completely.
Who am I?
I am Akhil, l’m doing my undergrad at Amrita University in India. I started contributing to Kdenlive since the beginning of 2019 and so far, I’ve helped with the audio capture – mostly writing almost the whole backend among small fixes and now on-board with the titler tool – all thanks to the extremely helpful community, especially the developer community here at Kdenlive 🙂
What are the goals for this summer?
Mainly, rewriting the backend. Currently, title clips are XML templates which are rendered using QGraphicsView. The aim is to replace this working backend as QGraphicsView is deprecated. In the new proposed backend, QML will be used (which allows a lot more flexibility in animating text or images) and rendering using QQuickRenderControl.
How is work going so far?
It’s been a little over a week since the coding period started and so far, it’s been going smooth. The backend rendering part has been developed as a library and is almost complete and still needs a CLI access. The goals for the next few weeks would be to slowly start integrating it with MLT, although that would be after we have a solid tested working library. The developer community and my mentor, Vincent have been very helpful and warm as always.
By the summer, a working backend and some progress on the Kdenlive side is what is proposed. Beyond that, a lot of work on Kdenlive side and after I expect we can all see the tool live in the coming future 🙂
If anyone wants to have a more detailed look, here’s my GSoC proposal
Do reach out if you have other queries 🙂
Hi, Akhil! Thank you for work and good luck!
Thank you David!
Thank you so much for working on this! So if I understand correctly, I should be able to open old kdenlive projects and still edit the text correct?
Also, will this work on the Windows version of Kdenlive?
I’m glad and grateful to the community for all of this 🙂 And yes, a converter for old title files will definitely be there. About compatibility, I want to say yes but at this point, I can’t really be absolutely correct as work has only begun.
better to no spent time on retro-compatibility, this can be done (maybe) using a project-converter at any (future) time, but i think no one will ask a retrocompatibility tool..
Good work
Hey there!
Fantastic to see someone working on this. Since you are new here, you may not know, but Kdenlive used to have a typewriter effect in the titler. Look it up online, there is some project in github to make it as an add-on, it may be something cool as a stretch goal for you.
Best of luck and happy coding!
Thanks Evert! Yeah from what I know from Vincent, the typewriter was mostly QGraphicsView’s fault which is exactly what we are replacing 🙂 Let’s hope it goes well
This is really good news. The existing titler is far from effective. Will be interested in seeing the first iterations of the project. Thanks for your work.
It’s my pleasure.
A proper titler is needed for Kdenlive for sure. Good luck with your project, Akhil! Thanks for doing your best to make it better for all of us!
Thank you for the kind comment Ivan! I’m glad to be a part of this community 🙂
I’m excited at the possibilities for animations that would be available from a QML based title tool. Thanks for all of your work on this and good luck this summer!
Thank you Matt!
This is great news. The current titler is merely adequate.
I am sorry I did not see your proposal earlier where you wrote:
> MLT has an addon called “WebVfx” which is used to write animations in QML but it uses the deprecated Qt Quick 1.
Actually, WebVfx has been updated to support Quick 2. See the commits on August 21, 2016:
https://github.com/mltframework/webvfx/commits/master
Maybe you looked at the original project repo, which has not been maintained for years whereas it has continued to evolve under MLT.
IMHO, the more difficult (but more enjoyable?) job is to create a nice UI that can read/write title compositions and support animation. Maybe it would be better to focus on that, but if you still prefer your lib then MLT will still accommodate it.
Good luck, Akhil!
Hi Dan,
Nice to ear from you!
Thanks for the update and advice! Is Webvfx now stable and efficient?
We had in mind to offer joining forces for GSoC, but this year we closed registration quite in rush…
Would you have more advice about UI design? Would you be interested to share Akhil’s work between Kdenlive and Shotcut?
We use Telegram to chat on this topic: https://t.me/kdenlive_dev