Hello Dear Developers! I have huge preferences for Open Source projects, and I'm quite willing and happy to contribute my time whenever I can and when my ideas are welcome. I'm a Blender user, mostly the Video Sequence Editor (VSE). It's the only open source video editing software that works reliably (I tested all the others that I could find, and they all failed at some point). I'm a C Language humble developer who is quite willing to learn Python for Blender's benefit. I'm a FreeBSD user, so that may help address Blender build scripts issues as well.
That being said, I've hit a huge wall using 4K video footage in Blender's VSE. The slowdown is so bad that Blender is totally unusable. I have ideas to fix this but I need some help to get started. I checked the Blender source code and was at a complete loss, unable to pinpoint small areas of code that I could work on just to add a simple feature (see later in this email). IRC vs FORUMS The issue has been raised in the mailing list recently. I think that info shared on IRC is too volatile. It's definitely not appropriate if you want to increase the number of contributors. There's no knowledge base, so it's an eternal cold start for every potential developer. A better solution is to create a developer discordapp.com server (free service for all). The benefit is that chats can be structured around precise topic channels, and there is also the possibility of voice channels when need be. There's basic search available as well. The Wiki is good if it can be kept up to date. The ultimate solution is a developer forum. I vote for that! Any application usage questions should be redirected to the other available venues to keep things relevant for developers. If you want the developer community to grow, it's very important for them to have a reliable source of info available in the simplest and fastest way possible. My first project would be: ADD A FONT CHANGE OPTION IN THE VSE TEXT STRIP When doing video editing, the text font change feature is an absolute given. Blender should certainly have it. Could someone point me in the right direction within the source code in order to implement this change? I did a global search of the word TEXT, and never found anything relevant. Next projects: Next features I would like to work on is adding a SCALE option in the IMAGE and VIDEO STRIPS. Use of a modifier strip on top of them is totally unnecessary and unproductive for the end-user. Also, the modifiers have rendering issues in the current implementation. But I'll ask help for that later as I'm not quite there as a developer yet. BLENDER USAGE DEAL-BREAKER: 4K VIDEO FOOTAGE HANDLING Since I'm writing this email, I'm sending this Blender Issue out there with the hope that it will be received favorably, and kept for further considerations in upcoming Blender releases. When editing videos, the preview window is very important on a frame by frame basis. In Blender, this is the VSE preview window. However, when handling 4K video footage, it becomes very sluggish. I suspect that window refreshes are calculated on the fly, redrawn, then user control interactivity can resume. This process is no longer viable when dealing with 4K video footage. To optimize this process, there should perhaps be a low priority thread that grabs all the window refresh requests, and refreshes the window at its own pace (using only the latest refresh data, discarding the old queued refresh data). With this parallel process, the user control interactivity (move to next or previous frame, play, stop, etc...) can happen uninterrupted, which is utterly important for the end-user. The preview refresh will eventually occur when it will be ready, and it's perfectly OK this way. If one wants it to work faster, one just need to upgrade to a faster CPU. Win! Win! Also Blender can easily be used on slower computers for users on low budget. Test case, load a 4K video footage in a video strip. Move anywhere within the strip and press the back arrow 5 times quickly in a row. When the end-user does that, he's not interested to see the intermediate frames in the VSE preview window. Only the end result is important. That's it for now. More about me: https://github.com/fossette Dominique. _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
