> 
> What am I missing? grab a headset w/ a mic, plug it in, use either the
> desktop recorder or ffmpeg to record the screen and audio all at the
> same time, do your thing, load in pitivi and edit away. A 1 minute
> "howto" would take all of 3 minutes to setup and record - so the
> longest piece would be the editing, not the recording.

As I said, I am a perfectionist. Last time, I spent a couple of hours:
1) writing the text of what I wanted to say, down to the exact words
2) narrating with a good microphone in a dead-silent environment
3) recording the video with gtkrecordmydesktop in a user account set up
specifically for this

The editing itself took maybe 10 minutes.

So let me make this clear again: I don't make many screencasts because
of the amount of preparation for the *speech* and *visuals* required,
not because I have problems editing them.


> English is your second language - no problem. If you speak clearly
> (even if with an accent), no one will really care - conjugate verbs
> wrong, don't match up plural/singular, who cares? Everyone will know
> you're ESL and that will add to the authenticity of the howto, not
> take away from it. 
> 
> Just think "ok, I'm going to show how to slice a movie", and go do it.
> Make some mistakes, so what? leave them in the video, it shows you're
> human... 
> 
> Really, if a 1-minute howto takes more than 5 min of your time you're
> over-thinking the process 

I don't make 30 seconds videos, the last one I made was 6 minutes long
with almost no gaps of silence other than regular sentence pauses.

I have no difficulties with verbs, plurals or even words or pronouns
commonly confused by native English speakers. I do have a slight accent,
and it helps a lot to have a text to narrate from, because it allows a
good pace while not stumbling on words or loosing my train of thought.
Saying "uuuh" and "um" sucks.

I sat through too many bad presentations and bad screencasts in my life.
If I make one for pitivi, given that it will go directly onto the
official website, I try to make it as close to perfection as possible.
Have you ever seen Apple's screencasts/feature demonstrations? Yeah, I
try to aim at that level (with my available means/limitations).

The reason I do not compromise in that regard is that I consider this to
be part of the public face of pitivi.



> That's right. I have a 4-core 2.39Gz laptop running Ubuntu 10.10 that
> doesn't come close to even 1/4 utilization when I'm previewing the
> video - the frames are always way delayed. I can know that at 10:15
> the frame changes (I'm screen casting an openoffice presentation), I
> can play in the preview and at 10:20 the preview window still hasn't
> change the frame. I have to go back to the timeline and click one
> frame at a time to see exactly where it changes, the previewer in
> "play" mode DOES NOT WORK CORRECTLY. I can record a screencast of this
> and several other problems if you want.

I used to have problems with files produced by gtkrecordmydesktop back
in 2009 (for some reason, the frames in the files I recorded back then
don't play in a fluid manner), but I just tested now with a screencast
recorded at 1920x1200 30fps and it played 100% fine in pitivi.

I'd be curious to see the footage file you are using. That sounds like a
candidate for a bug report.

If live playback of screencast footage is not fluid enough on a quad
core system, I believe this is a performance bug that should be fixed,
not worked around with an additional user interface that hides the
problem under the rug...



> Honestly, pitivi gets 80% of the work done smoothly. But if you could
> write a block of code that would take a project and spit out the
> timing of each clip into raw text, I would write a bash script to take
> that output and convert it to a ffmpeg command. After that, all the
> fine-tuning I would need done (like re-editing those splice points), I
> would just modify the ffmpeg line and never go back to pitivi (until
> the next project) because pitivi lacks easy frame-by-frame editing. 
> 
> If you couldn't write the "timing exporter", then my earlier
> suggestion was you write a "timing editor" that doesn't involve the
> mouse or visually moving things around.

Well, technically, the .xptv files are xml that can be edited or parsed
by external tools :) or if there was someone sufficiently motivated to
write a patch for this UI you're talking about, perhaps that would
work... but again, I'm still unsure why you would need such a UI if you
had good playback performance to begin with. 
It feels to me like using chlorpromazine to cure a headache.



> Another bug I've seen a little bit too much of lately: you drag a clip
> and about 2 sec after you let go, it jumps back where it was before.
> You can do this endlessly, it will never stay where you put it.
> Workaround (as most problems are): save the project, close pitivi,
> re-open and try it again (now it works of course). 

Yeah, when some bugs make pitivi go into an inconsistent state, the UI
stops responding properly (I'm not sure why that should be the case).
Ideally you should check if anything is printed to the terminal
indicating what the heck is going on exactly that causes pitivi to
block. And then perhaps it could go in a bug report if not done
already :)

I mean it's not like it's *supposed* to do that!


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