Kdenlive - latest developments

Friday, 30 December 2011  |  Jean-Baptiste Mardelle

#Inside  

Here is a quick info on the features introduced in Kdenlive git since the release of Kdenlive 0.8.2.1.

Audio Recording

Capture through MLT's avformat producer now supports audio only capture. It even works while playing the timeline, so that you can record a comment while viewing your project. You can see a screenshot of the updated capture widget.

Clip Jobs

A generic job framework was introduced, based on the proxy clip feature. Here are some of the consequences:

  • It means first that the proxy clip got some UI improvements. Progress of the proxy job is now shown in a small progress bar at the bottom of the clip thumbnail, so that the operation is not distrubing your workflow.
  • Then, the new job framework is intended to make it easier to introduce new operations on project clip, for example a new Extract zone feature allows to cut parts of a clip without re-encoding (using FFmpeg codec copy feature).
  • Another related feature is the introduction of clip analysis for some effects. For now, it is available in the "Sox Gain" effect that now has a "Normalize" button. This will trigger an analysis of the clip to find the best gain correction.
  • More jobs are expected to appear, for example the Stabilize feature could be ported to it.

Online services integration

A new Online Resource widget made its appearance, and allows you to easily browse and download resources from the web. Currently, two services are implemented:

  • The excellent Freesound free audio library allows you to search and import audio clips in a few clicks.
  • The great Open Clip Art library allows you to import graphic files.

That's all for now, but I am quite happy with those newly introduces features, after all those months spent fixing bugs for the last release.

Interested testers can get the current git version from sunab's experimental PPA, or through the Kdenlive Build script.

Next, we have to work on the refactoring suff to improve our existing code, make it more modular and easier to contribute.

Thanks for reading, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle