> 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.
>
>
>
> Aha! Now this is a key point. A very very key point. Consider the
> irony:
>
> We have the creator of a video editing software who says it takes a
> very long time to create a screencast of his tool, and no doubt will
> be using his tool to do the final edit / rendering.
Nice try :) but the long part is not actually editing the screencast...
the long part is writing down every single word I want to utter in the
screencast, recording my voice ensuring that I don't stutter or
mispronounce anything (even though I'm very good in English, it is a
second language), and then recording my screen to match my voice.
I typically want to record it all in one fluid shot, not multiple takes
(that would require transitions and might feel a bit unsettling)... And
I'm a friggin' perfectionist.
> My recommendation on documentation for this project: make it all short
> howtos. Most people already know what they want to do and instead of
> having to read the entire section on editing to find the 2 things they
> wanted to do, if there was a "howto" for each of those items they
> could skip through the howtos and just read/watch the two or three
> they really need. The manual could be more of a discourse of the
> details around the howtos, why they work the way the work, etc...
>
> And I'd do the howtos in screen-capture format. A picture is worth a
> thousand words and a 60-sec 15fps video would be worth 0.9 million
> words - imagine having to write that many words in a document vs
> spending 5 min to capture/clip/render a quick "here's how you do XYZ"
> howto video.
100% agreed. I see my screencasts as complementary to the user manual
because they explain stuff more efficiently and in a more globally
integrating way; however, I've been sitting on the prospect of doing a
2nd one for a long time (in part because I was waiting for new fancy
features to show off).
> On that note, a forum can quickly become a FAQ - just make the best
> example of a commonly asked question and it's answer "sticky". Again
> 80/20. 80% of the people going to the forum will have their answers in
> just 20% of the forum discussion - the stickys.
There are a couple of problems with forums:
- developers typically don't spend time to crawl through these (even the
bug tracker was a mess before I came around)
- they can become a mess real quick, and I know I'd be pretty much the
only one doing maintenance in there :P
- spammers
To some extent, the launchpad questions/answers (for the pitivi package
in ubuntu) serves this purpose (I am now subscribed to it and have been
answering questions in English and French for the past few months. I
also created a few FAQs out of questions).
> Jeff (and all other developers involved), thanks for taking the time
> to produce this awesome tool. It has bugs, which are mostly just
> quirks now (bug - can't get around it, quirk - close and re-open and
> it's "fixed" - inconvenient but not a show-stopper), and it's come a
> long way in just two releases (about a year of development?), and I
> find it invaluable when it comes to editing my videos
Thanks :)
For the record, I'm one of the most passionate pitivi users out there,
and even I recognize there are a *lot* of weird and highly annoying
bugs. There's a big need for contributors willing to fix them.
On a more positive note, I just submitted the application for pitivi to
become a standalone mentoring organization in this year's Summer of Code
programme. Hopefully this will get accepted, and I hope to attract as
many new contributors as possible to implement some much-needed and
long-awaited features.
> 1. Have a timeline direct editor.
I'm not sure I understand exactly your solution... it seems a bit like a
complex/overengineered solution for a possibly simple problem (or group
of problems). Namely, you mention:
> 20 min later when I watch the final I see I got one of the clip points wrong
> by 3 seconds.
Hang on, you can't see this when previewing the timeline live?
Or do you mean that the sound desynchs from the video (if that's the
case, it's a bug that needs to be fixed, not worked around with a
complex band-aid UI :)
> I have to slide everything else to the right (to make room), stretch
> out the clip or reduce it a little at a time, at full zoom - very slow
> process
Have you considered using ripple/roll editing? (see the user guide :)
It's a slightly more advanced feature, but I think it might solve your
problem and make you much more efficient.
> 2. The ability to save user-defined render profiles.
Totally. That's why I even put it in the GSoC ideas:
http://wiki.pitivi.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code#Rendering_profiles
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