22/03/2004 - Kdenlive 0.2.4 released

Another release of Kdenlive 0.2.4 has finally been squeezed out of the door; pick it up at the usual places.

A full press release can be found on the following web page :

http://www.uchian.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/kdenlive_press.html

Preparing for Kdenlive 0.2.4

Kdenlive cvs is now in feature freeze for 0.2.4; only show stopper bugs and translations remain before release. This is mainly a bug fix release, although there are several new features such as the new "marker" tool, and the ability to import Kino projects into Kdenlive.

If you know of any bugs in the cvs version of Kdenlive, let me know!

14/12/2003 - New features in cvs

Just a heads-up on some of the new features that have been going into cvs recently. Initial support for snap markers has been added. When finished, this feature will let you accurately align clips to each other at any frame, not limited to their end points.

A new load/save framework has been implemented for projects. This will allow for better compatability across versions of Kdenlive, and opens up the possibility of supporting project file formats from other video editors in the future.

You can give clips descriptions; this will become more useful when subclips are implemented.

Finally, you can play the defined inpoint/outpoint section of a clip by pressing Ctrl-Space, or clicking the relevant button on the monitor.

20/10/2003 - Kdenlive 0.2.3 released!

As of last Monday, Kdenlive and Piave version 0.2.3 have been released to the public. This release has a great deal of new features and improvements over the last released version, 0.2.0, including multiple video monitors, improved snap-to-clip support, AVI DV import, and numerous other improvements.

A full press release can be found on the following web page :

http://www.uchian.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/kdenlive_press.html

8/10/2003 - Last minute bug reports, please!

Well, although it's been almost two months since I was hoping to release Kdenlive/piave 0.2.3, we are finally almost almost ready for release. (Honest, this time). There were some significant memory leaks in piave that took some time to track down and fix, but everything seems to be working.

But before go about releasing the new version, I would ask that those who are capable download the cvs version, try it and report any issues you have. If nothing turns up, I will package Kdenlive up in two or three days time.

Thankyou for your patience!

17/09/2003 - Kdenlive Handbook Online!

You can now view both the English and French translations of the Kdenlive handbook on the Documentation page. Rejoice!

15/09/2003 - Never Believe my Time Estimates

Erm, yes, quite. Due to a number of issues, 0.2.3 isn't yet out. This is just a little note stating the obvious :-) I am still hoping to release shortly, honest.

25/08/2003 - 1 week to 0.2.3 (hopefully!!!)

We are almost ready to release Kdenlive/Piave 0.2.3 to the unsuspecting public. Gilles is finishing off the French translation this week, and except for the odd bug fix, everything is ready.

10/08/2003 -FAQ's and keyboard shortcuts

A new Frequently Asked Questions page has been added to the site. For the moment, there are three questions on there, but I shall be expanding this as and when people ask me questions more frequently :-) This page will not become one of those "witty" FAQ pages with questions made up by the author - only those questions that I get asked a lot will make it to the page.

It turned out that adding configurable keyboard shortcuts and configurable toolbars was much easier than I had anticipated - so instead of waiting for Kdenlive 0.3.0, it is not implemented and will make it into Kdenlive 0.2.3!

07/08/2003 - Preparing for 0.2.3

We are hoping to release a new version of kdenlive and piave in the next couple of weeks. This will not be the fabled 0.3.0 release, but 0.2.3, and will include all of the features currently working in cvs, including inpoints/outpoints and workspace/clip monitors, two important points missing from Kdenlive 0.2

Please please please file bug reports on the sourceforge bug tracker, as this is the easiest way for me to track which bugs are still outstanding and need to be dealt with.I am hoping to reduce the number of bugs on the tracker to zero by the 0.2.3 release :-)

21/07/2003 - Snap to grid works!, Onto inpoint/outpoint support

As it says - I finally found the time to finish refactoring the snap to grid code. Now in cvs. Most of the results of this are completely from a development point of view, although it does mean that it is much more easy to add extra tools now - I'll prove this once I have scratched my next itch :-)

I am now working on making the inpoint/outpoint selection on the clip and workspace monitors working correctly. The idea is that you can select which part of a video you want to use in the clip monitor, and then drag that section of the clip to the timeline.

19/06/2003 - Progress

Well, I still haven't managed to do much myself, but Rolf and Giles have been busy - Giles has been working on adding some polish to the interface - tooltips, information in the about box, etc. and has also started looking to i80n'ise Piave.

Rolf is currenlty busy working on getting version 0.3 of Piave ready; amongst other things, there is support for effects and it now plays AVI dv's. Great stuff! Only problem is that the communication between piave and kdenlive is not yet in place, so you are limited to using example scripts for the moment.

I'm still looking to finish work on snap-to-grid - not enough free time these days, grr...

09/06/2003 - Quarterly Update...

Well, no I hope this doesn't become a regular thing, but I realise that I haven't udated the site for quite some time. Things are still ticking along at a sedate pace, an hour's coding here or there from myself, Rolf as been similarly lacking in time, tied up by his thesis, and the testers, well they're waiting for us to do some more stuff for them to test!

Kdenlive could really do with your help! If you like what you have seen so far and feel you'd like to help develop then please get in touch and let me know!

Anyway, the main plan of action is still to get the Gui up to scratch, I am currently working on making snap-to-grid functionality generic amongst all tools, which will aid development greatly. Once done, I will release Kdenlive 0.2.2, something that should have been done a while ago, except for lack of time. This will sync up with the piave of the same version number, and hopefully get rid of the weekly email talking about the abs() error in Kdenlive 0.2.0 :-)

Once the gui is sorted, I shall be moving on to add a few extra file formats to Piave, and making everything work with everything else.

15/03/2003 - Kdenlive translated to French!

Things have been a bit slow on the development front recently, since I have started a new job, and Rolf has been attending a conference in California. This hasn't stopped Giles though, who has been busily translating Kdenlive into French. Check out the screenshots page!

15/02/2003 - CVS Kdenlive/Piave now work together again.

Recently, the CVS versions of kdenlive and piave have been pretty much useless due to major incompatabilities and developments. These have now been fixed somewhat, so you can now check out the development version to see how much progress is being made.

05/02/2003 - Development Progress.

We are now well into the development of the next release of Kdenlive/Piave. Currently, we are working on the capabilities section of the interface (yeah, very internal and if your not a developer, quite boring!) Well, in simple terms, Piave (or any other renderer) will tell Kdenlive what it can do, what file formats it supports, what effects it can perform, etc. etc. etc, and Kdenlive will then make all this info available to the user.

(Almost) all of our development effort is on supporting multiple file formats. This has required large changes in Piave, since it has moved over to a plugin architecture for easy expansion in the future. For Kdenlive, the main problem is on generically displaying all of the potential formats, codecs and parameters that they contain in an easy to understand, pleasing manner without being forced to hand code thousands of dialogs. We're getting there!

I would like to mention that Gilles CAULIER has offered to translate Kdenlive into French, and as a MjpegTools contributor, he is interested in adding VCD, SVCD, XVCD, DVD and DIVX support to Piave. I hope he is completely and utterly successful!

CVS is currently unstable, since Kdenlive and Piave are not quite in sync with one another yet, but stay tuned, and if interested, join the development effort!

15/01/2003 - Looking to the future.

It's been a very pleasant two days after the release, watching the traffic flow through the website and getting a warm fuzzy feeling from the odd praising comment. Keep them coming! We are very interested in hearing any ideas or problems that you wish to share with us.

Looking forwards to our next release, I have updated the roadmap on the progress page to show where we are, and the features that we are going to be adding in the next release.

For the moment, transitions and effects are on the back-burner - we are aiming for better editing tools, better usability, and more file formats! Check out the progress page for the complete list.

13/01/2003 - Kdenlive/PIAVE 0.2.0 beta released

We are very happy to announce the first beta release of Kdenlive and PIAVE. Together, Kdenlive and PIAVE form a video editing system, capable of editing, previewing and exporting DV video files.

Kdenlive provides a user-friendly KDE-based GUI environment for managing and editing your project, whilst PIAVE is seamlessly integrated to provide the low level support for video editing and playback.

This beta has been given a new version number (0.2.0) to bring the version numbers of PIAVE and kdenlive into sync.

A full press release can be found on the following web page : http://www.uchian.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/kdenlive_press.html

07/01/2003 - Kdenlive uses KDockWidgets

I have added the use of KDockWidgets to Kdenlive. Essentially, this means that you can lay out the application however you want to - just drag the various windows around with the use of the Dock bar on the top of each widget, and you can put widgets into tab views, gimp-style layouts, or just shove the timeline at the top of the window if you so desire. Check out the screenshots to get a better idea of what I mean!

01/01/2003 - Happy New Year and a tar.gz of kdenlive

Hope everyone out there had a happy new year! I think it is nice to start the year as you mean to go on, and so I have now uploaded the first alpha release of Kdenlive. Head over to the download page for more info, and contact me if you run into any difficulties.

20/12/2002 - Undo/Redo and the continuing quest for the holy first release

Kdenlive has now gained multiple undo/redo functionality, and load/save support! If that's not enough for you, Piave now uses YUV overlays for all video output, and is threaded for lower latency. In fact, apart from some minor bugs that need to be sorted out, we should have a first source release out soon.

Of course, I've said that before ;-)

30/11/2002 - Integration underway

The integration of Kdenlive and Piave is well underway! Piave can now embed itself into Kdenlive, and display clips. Kdenlive can then tell Piave to seek around the clips. Nice! At the moment, Piave is using it's own hard coded render tree, so the next step is to communicate the contents of the timeline to Piave. It's possible that we will have this working within the week, so stay tuned!

17/11/2002 - Kdenlive Update

We've been busy recently - Kdenlive is coming along nicely, The timeline is capable of drag 'n' drop, multiple selection, snapping clips to each other, and more. Rolf's rendering engine, Piave, is gaining some interesting new features, and we have almost finalised the interface on how the two should communicate. Look in the document section for the latest version of the interface.

I finished tracking down the last known bug in the timeline code today, but have to wait for sourceforge CVS to come back on-line before I can commit it :-)

Our main priority now that all of the main architectural decisions have been made, is to get a version released that does something, and shows off what Kdenlive and Piave are capable of. Don't hold your breath, but I think we may have something out in about a month.

29/10/2002 - Cutter News

A couple of interesting updates. Firstly and most importantly, Rolf Dubitzky is very interested in bringing his rendering engine together with the Kdenlive GUI to the mutual benefit of all involved!

Secondly, I have now uploaded a new module to CVS, nullcutter. This is a skeleton Cutter which will act as a proof-of-principle for the communication from Cutter and GUI. It will also act as a template for writing new cutter. At present, the interface has not been completed, but you can run nullcutter and kdenlive (in that order) and get a little "bouncing ball" embedded in the correct place in the GUI. It's not much yet, but I was happy to see it working!

17/09/2002 - Soundcard Blues

I have been chasing down the bugs in the aRts code, only to discover that most of the problems I have been experiencing are probably not my (or aRts') fault. The trouble is the dodgy drivers for the Aureal Vortex that I have. Damn. I'm going to have to get a new soundcard before I can effectively pick up any audio or movie related code again.

15/09/2002 - Timeline Progress

OK, I have some free time again now. Progress on the timeline continues, it is now possible to zoom in/out! Fixed up timing issues with the timeline, there are a couple of outstanding issues with moving things about on the timeline that need to be addressed, and a nasty bug which crashes Kdenlive on exit which I haven't started tracking down yet. If all goes well (I know, I know, I said these exact words last month) then I should have something up and running by the end of next week. No promises this time though!

08/09/2002 - Slow Development

Just a note so that the site doesn't look dead - I have not had much time to work on Kdenlive recently, and neither has Christian. However, development is still in progress.

22/08/2002 - Removed deadline

I haven't got as much time to work on kdenlive as I would like recently, and don't know how long it's going to take to reach the deadline. So for the moment, I've removed a set date for reaching the first milestone. All I can say is - it will happen soon!

07/08/2002 - Milepost deadline put back a week on Sunday

I had hoped to have reached the first milepost by the end of tommorrow, that is, I would have all basic timeline functionality finished. However, since I am going to be out all day tommorrow, and because the code I need to write is relatively complex, that is not going to happen.

To reach this milepost, Kdenlive still needs to be capable of several things :

• Dragging those files onto the timeline
• Selecting and moving them around on the timeline
• Deleting them from the timeline
• Razoring them on the timeline (cutting a single clip into two clips
• Copying and pasting a clip on the timeline
• Cropping clips on the timeline
• Zooming in/out of the timeline.

The code to handle this is very tightly woven and more complex than I was anticipating, and so I need a few more days to make sure that I get it right. I want all this functionality added now, as it leaves a firm foundation to build from. Basically though, attempting to miss out some of this functionality will mean another rewrite of the timeline code to add it in at a later date.

21/07/2002 - KRuler development continues

Turns out developing a fully fledged custom widget is more time consuming than I anticipated. The KRuler now has support for multiple sliders, custom sliders, it supports system wide colors and user defined marking systems. What I still need to add : orientation support (it is currently horizontal only. This is unnecessary for my app at the moment, but may be necessary later), I need to fix the mouse dragging logic, and I need to tidy the code up a little. Oh, and document it.

12/07/2002 - Timeline & Edit File codec development

Work on drag 'n' drop has gone as far as it can for the moment, and my next task is to develop the timeline. I want it to be as general as possible so that it can be re-used in similar programs in the future. My first step is to write a generic KRuler class which I already have need of twice in the interface. Visually, this is already complete. All I have to do now is to give it the functionality of multiple sliders by adding marks to the widget. The latest picture shows the ruler both on the timeline, and in the monitor window.

Christian has begun work on the editing file codec format. More news as and when it arrives.

26/06/2002 - Drag 'n' Drop on it's way soon

A minor update, but I am now implementing drag 'n' drop... and realising that I am also implementing the saving and loading of clips in the process. I'm a touch unsure as to information on standards for mime type encoding for drag and drop, but I have decided that all data passed by drag 'n' drop will be as XML files, converted to strings using the toUTF8() method. If this is a bad idea, please contact me and let me know.

As the drag 'n' drop data is XML, and the file format for my project is XML, it suddenly made a great deal of sense to only write the XML code once, so with drag 'n' drop I also get half of my saving and loading code too.

The downside to all this reuse of code is that I have to write more than I had anticipated to get drag 'n' drop working in the first place, so whilst I still aim for finishin it by the end of the week, it may take longer.

20/06/2002 - Internal Design

I think I've sorted the design out now for the clips, as soon as I have made this compile, I'll update the changes to CVS.

My next task is to start looking at drag'n'drop support again. I want to have it up and running by the end of next week, hopefully. I will then start building up the timeline. In particular, I want to be able to drag clips onto the timeline, and move them around and delete them again. I give myself another week to do that ;-)

12/06/2002 - Project Update

Wow - a month since I've had time to do any real work on this. Mainly due to the transition of Mandrake Cooker from gcc 2.96 to gcc3.01 completely breakng my build system... Oh well, it's back up now, and I've finally managed to add some aRts support that doesn't crash, though it is incredibly slow at adding files at the moment due to the way it checks file lengths (and I mean _slow_). Will be looking for better solution sometime soon, but at the moment I am simply happy that it works.

My next major task is to sort out exactly how clips, tracks and video files are going to be stored within project. This is trickier than it first seems, as a clip can effectively include an entire project itself, and can then have effects overlayed on top of it... and of course, the user should see no difference in the use of a clip over the use of a video file, except that clips can be "expanded" to see what is in them.

Or to put it another way, any part of the timeline can be taken and reduced to a single clip, which can then be used like a single piece of video footage. This is great when you have some tightly edited title sequence which cannot be rendered down because it contains elements such as e.g. Titles which need updating per show, but when your editing a 30 minute long show you really don't want to have to look at the title sequence as 100 seperate clips, transitions and overlays...

18/05/2002 - Added Cutting List Specification

After discussions with Christian, I have now written up the cutting list file specification as far as it stands at present. It is now available on this page in the documentation section.

11/05/2002 - Ported to KDE 3

Latest updates to CVS should make Kdenlive compile on KDE 3. It wasn't a major job porting it - mostly it was getting KDevelop to generate a new set of files for Automake/Autoconfig, and then adding a couple of headers here and there where they seem to have changed in QT. My next aim is to make the AVFile calculate the correct lengths of files using aRts, which is mainly a case of figuring out why aRts keeps crashing the program whenever I try and use it at the moment...

1/05/2002 - Site update

I have added a number of documents which some may find interesting on the status of the project. I will keep this up to date whenever something happens. Finally, I have added a mailing list for people interested in kdenlive development.

28/04/2002 - New developer : Christian Berger

Christian Berger is the first developer to join kdenlive, and so we can now officially be called the kdenlive team! Christian wrote the deinterlacing effect for EffecTV. Hopefully development will go twice as fast now :-)

20/04/2002 - Kdenlive is stil-still alive

Since the last news item, I have got a lot of stuff done. Most of the interface uses QT-designer now, which means it's easily maintained, and the timeline now works in principle - it displays correctly, except that anything to do with drag-n-drop is going to have to wait until I update to KDE 3 (see my diary entry). I've also had to remove all traces of arts code for the present, as it kept crashing - probably because I don't yet understand it well enough to be sure that I've included all of the necessary bits and pieces. Hopefully the upgrade to KDE3 will make that process a lot smoother as well.

I'm still looking into the progress of arts video - there are a couple of competing projects at the moment, but none of them have progressed far enough to be of any use to me yet. In the meantime, I want to make Kdenlive work as a fully-fledged sound editor. Hmmm... I might take a look at KWave and see if I can integrate it in some way. I hope to be able to take a look at video4linux integration in the future as well.

21/03/2002 - Kdenlive is still alive

Although I haven't had time to work on it for the last month or so :-) I am still working on Kdenlive. I am currently working on geting audio files loaded, figuring out their length without playing them, and other useful stuff like this. Then I will move onto writing the timeline.