To the new readers here: There is a wiki page with a collection of suggested usability enhancements for Cinelerra, here: http://lab.dyne.org/cinelerra/Usability
One of my pet peeves is that users shouldn't be expected to care about settings for which there is a 99% safe default. YUV, YUVA, RGB, RGBA or floating point presision color format? My guess is that 90% of the users ought to use YUVA, so let that be the default. Is the difference in memory footprint between YUV and YUVA so big that it warrants a setting? I'm not sure. PAL, NTSC or anything else? Firstly, that should depend on what the user loads upon startup. If it's a PAL video, setting the project resolution to PAL is a fairly safe bet, in my opinion. If it's 1080i HDV, set the project to 1440x1080. I also think the default should be either PAL or NTSC, depending on the user's locale. If you're in Europe, you're most likely to deal with PAL, for example. Interlacing... That's so involved that it belongs in an essay of its own! Cinelerra must know more about interlacing, so that the users can get by without know anything about it. Aspect ratio. There is not really any setting in Cinelerra for that. There's a project setting labelled "aspect ratio", but that's the _display_ aspect ratio. And it's _global_, which is just wrong! Because the aspect ratio can differ between sources, so if you mix sources (16:9 and 4:3, for example) Cinelerra will not try to Do The Right Thing. We may keep the global Aspect Ratio setting, but that would only be a _render_ setting, i.e. "render to 16:9". A missing setting/property is the "pixel ratio". If Cinelerra knew the pixel ratio for every resource, it could calculate and perform the appropriate stretching and cropping/padding, without user intervention. Pixel and aspect ratios are often not quite what we think they are, as explained here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/tvbranding/picturesize.shtml This was quite a mouthful! There is more, but I think this chunk of suggestions will do for now. Any objections? -- Herman Robak _______________________________________________ Cinelerra mailing list [email protected] https://init.linpro.no/mailman/skolelinux.no/listinfo/cinelerra
