> This program drives me nuts. Despite its obvious potential, it is
> hopelessly counterintuitive.
It aims not to be counterintuitive. It may do some things differently
than, say, Adobe Premiere (a usability disaster) or iMovie or Kdenlive,
but it all fits in a broader vision that makes it both more efficient
and still easy (or easier!) to use.
Take splitting for example. In pitivi, it is modeless. You may have to
take a look at the section on splitting in the user guide circa page 19.
> The tools in the Timeline bar never become active. And there isn't one
> blessed word in the absolutely inadequate documentation on the
> subject.
I have a hard time believing that 25 pages of documentation can be
absolutely inadequate.
That being said, I can indeed see that there is no mention that "the
timeline toolbar does not become sensitive until you actually select a
clip to operate on". I guess I should add that to my neverending todo
list for the manual, but I don't know where you expect this information
to appear in the manual exactly?
> The You Tube tutorials are frankly terrible.
I do not make the contents on YouTube. I can not attest to their quality
or lack thereof.
I've been thinking of making a new official screencast when the next
version comes out, but it's taking a long time to come out. And making
screencasts takes a *long* time... at least if you want them to match
the narrating quality of the one I did three years ago for 0.13.1.
> You guys should learn that everyone walks before they can run. Please
> put out some 'See Dick run' documentation on the simplest, most basic
> operations before you begin extolling all the advanced tools.
Before you start saying I have put no effort at catering to newbies
whatsoever, have a look at the documentation of other projects, and then
compare that to the amount of explanations/steps I wrote for what is
usually considered trivial. Like "making selections" on page 13 or
"saving a project" on page 10 or "clips vs files" or "understanding
layers".
Another explanation of the phenomenon you are seeing is that, while
basic stuff is important, advanced features sometimes take priority in
documentation because 1) they are more satisfying to document 2) they
are *advanced* features! If you don't document them, nobody will know
how to use them, whereas "basic operations" may be grasped intuitively
by some users.
Again, I'm not saying documenting the basic stuff is not important, but
it's a neverending process and just when you think you had documented
enough to make everyone happy, someone comes up and says that it's an
unclear piece of shite and that you're an arrogant elitist.
I'm entirely open to constructive criticism, for example saying "this
particular section is unclear" or "there needs to be a new section on
how to accomplish X", but just saying that the entire manual does not
care about newcomers and that we should "learn" that "everybody walks
before they can run" is a bit rude. It's not like I don't know that
there surely are some things that are hard to grasp to newcomers, I just
can't magically guess what they are and I can't magically find 20 hours
a week to write the thing. Writing documentation isn't exactly trivial
and I've been pretty much alone in writing the contents in my spare
time.
Oh, and if I want to finish the move to the Mallard documentation
format, I need to somehow figure out how to integrate it directly into
pitivi git. Additional pain.
P.s.: the rendering section totally, totally sucks and I'm not in the
best position to write it (since I take too much for granted).
Contributions welcome, though you'd have to write it against the git
version of pitivi, which had its project settings and rendering
interface completely redesigned.
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