Pitivi on Thibault Saunier

GStreamer Editing Services OpenTimelineIO support

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

GStreamer Editing Services OpenTimelineIO support

OpenTimelineIO is an Open Source API and interchange format for editorial timeline information, it basically allows some form of interoperability between the different post production Video Editing tools. It is being developed by Pixar and several other studios are contributing to the project allowing it to evolve quickly.

We, at Igalia, recently landed support for the GStreamer Editing Services (GES) serialization format in OpenTimelineIO, making it possible to convert GES timelines to any format supported by the library. This is extremely useful to integrate GES into existing Post production workflow as it allows projects in any format supported by OpentTimelineIO to be used in the GStreamer Editing Services and vice versa.

On top of that we are building a GESFormatter that allows us to transparently handle any file format supported by OpenTimelineIO. In practice it will be possible to use cuts produced by other video editing tools in any project using GES, for instance Pitivi:

At Igalia we are aiming at making GStreamer ready to be used in existing Video post production pipelines and this work is one step in that direction. We are working on additional features in GES to fill the gaps toward that goal, for instance we are now implementing nested timeline support and framerate based timestamps in GES. Once we implement them, those features will enhance compatibility of Video Editing projects created from other NLE softwares through OpenTimelineIO. Stay tuned for more information!

PiTiVi 0.15 is out

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The PiTiVi team is proud to announce the 0.15 release. This will be the last release using the “traditional” core/engine of PiTiVi. The next releases will be based on GStreamer Editing Services (GES) and should thus depart significantly from this release in terms of performance, features and stability.

Jean François did a great screencast that sums up what has been done during the last 2 years:

He also published the video of the 2011 desktop summit and PiTiVi/GES hackfest for your enjoyment

All those videos are also accessible in HTML5 versions on the showcase page.

Thanks to everybody who made this release possible!

PiTiVi: Let's go faster!

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As I said in the last release announcement post, the PiTiVi community needs changes in the releasing process, and as newly appointed release manager I have the primary goal of making the development as dynamic as possible. The last release cycle lasted 8 months, which is way too long when we are supposed to be following the “release early, release often” philosophy. Avoiding it, is something we really want to work on, but I think a little explanation of why it happened is well needed:

We had blocker bugs that could only be fixed by the main developers, and it was difficult for them to do so.
The person in charge of releasing was much too busy to do the job, which is why I have now been appointed as new release manager and will do my best to find the time to do it well.
We did not have any release schedule, which meant that we did not have any obligation concerning releases.

Also I want to explain a few of the reasons why I do believe this is something we really want to avoid:

Users think nothing is happening, that the project is dying. Yet, as the activity on our git repository shows, rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.
Potential contributors are hesitant to invest in the project because they think the project is dormant.
Without a feature freeze, bugs tend to accumulate as new features land Contributors may be discouraged by the fact that they do not see their work reach the users quickly enough.
There are many more reasons, as you can guess, but listing them all here would take too much time and I would have to delay the release ;-)

Therefore, we decided to take a set of measures concerning our release process to keep our current developers active and attract as many new contributors as possible. So here are the changes that are going to occur in the near future:

First and foremost, starting from now, PiTiVi should follow the Gnome release schedule. This is not going to be easy, since our manpower is quite limited, but this is something that is really needed to ensure a healthy development pace.
Have an official patch review policy: we want to “guarantee” that any patch that is sent to us will be reviewed *within 3 weeks*. This is also a great opportunity for new contributors who have experience in programming in general and would like to start by reading and improving other’s code. Collaboration towards making a great patch is a great motivator! Upholding this goal will be a challenge, and your help in reviewing patches is very welcome.
We want to make sure that deprecated libraries or broken/unmaintained features get removed as fast as possible. Dead code must die.

The project is pretty active these days, and I believe it is the right time to get those changes done. The feature list is becoming bigger and bigger and thanks to our very close relationship with the GStreamer multimedia framework, implementing new ones is becoming very simple. Also, the GStreamer community is very active and we are looking forward the GStreamer 1.0 release which should come out soon and will bring us new opportunities toward our goal of creating a video editor that can serve the needs of professional video editors.

So if you are interested in helping us making those changes happen, you are very welcome to have a look at our wiki page and our task list. I also warmly encourage you to join us on #pitivi on the freenode irc server, I am sure people will be happy to help you getting involved in this great software development project!

PiTiVi 0.14 "No longer kills kittens"

Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The PiTiVi team is proud to announce the immediate availability of our new 0.14 release, with major new features, bug fixes and usability improvements. We hope you can use and enjoy the improvements in PiTiVi 0.14, and report bugs you may encounter (bugs are a fact of life! Help us hunt them out!).

Some of the major new features deserve to be enhanced in here such as:

Audio and video effects: with PiTiVi 0.14, it is now possible to add all the effects provided by GStreamer and some other libraries, which, depending on what is installed on your system, means “a lot”. The user interface for managing those effects will improve in future releases.

Ability to preview video, audio and image files before importing: the file chooser dialog now lets you directly preview the files you want to import. This is pretty useful when you don’t remember the name of a file you wanted to import, or when you’re just “looking around” for media to use in your project.

Welcome dialog: when starting PiTiVi, a startup assistant now helps you load recently used projects in two clicks or create a new project. Don’t feel like using this dialog? Just click its Close button or press the “Escape” key on your keyboard. However, we trust that this little fella will make you much more efficient, not less. We hate useless windows. See also this post, for some explanation of the design process that went into this welcome dialog.

…And more. See the full release notes for a more exhaustive list of goodies.

This release cycle has been very eventful. As the list of contributors reveals, lots of people got involved in the software development. I also want to thank all the people who worked hard on translating PiTiVi in a timely manner and reporting localization issues.

We are now entering a new cycle on the road to maturity. Four students are working full time on PiTiVi this summer, thanks to the Google Summer of Code program, and we will try to increase the general development pace to keep the great momentum we had in the past few weeks. Stay tuned for another blog post on how we plan to achieve this!

To celebrate, I personally wanted to do some dogfooding by making this little video, with the additional constraint of using only footage coming from my own camera (no, I am not a video artist!):

here or here

But this is for sure, not the best PiTiVi can do. See our showcase page for examples of videos we found to be aesthetically interesting, and feel free to submit your own! Post links to your videos in comments, and if they’re really cool, they could end up in our showcase! ;)

PiTiVi pre-release

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The whole PiTiVi team is pleased to announce a pre-release of the PiTiVi video editor.

This pre-release contains the past 7 months of work, implementing this pretty new feature list:

Audio and video effects
Completely redesigned project settings dialog, with the ability to create presets
Completely redesigned rendering dialog
Welcome dialog that helps you start a project or load recent projects in two clicks
Ability to preview video, audio and image files before importing
Add a “best fit” zoom button
Ability to jump to an exact position in the timeline
Ability to specify custom aspect ratios and framerates
Show a progress bar when loading projects
300% faster project timeline loading
Search bar in the Media Library
Ability to detach all the tabs and the previewer
New manpage
Commandline render mode
Use the standard infobar widget all around
And lots of bug fixing

Unless anything critical or regressions pop up, expect the 0.14 release next tuesday (May 31st).

Please test it and abuse it and report bugs at:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=pitivi

Tarballs are available here:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/pitivi/0.13/pitivi-0.13.9.90.tar.gz

Expect updated Ubuntu packages soon on the GStreamer Developers PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~gstreamer-developers/+archive/ppa

Thanks for testing and helping us make this the best release ever :)

Pitivi master finaly gets effects!

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

So as suggested by the title, the work I did during the Google Summer Of Code has been Merged! It means that the next Pitivi release which should arrive quite soon will gain effects.

I haven’t been blogging for a long while so sorry about not telling you what was happening but I did it in order to make a surprise :P

Now that it is merged, you are very welcome to test it and report all the bugs you will find so we have a great release soon to propose the world…. with effects!

Sorry for not making a screencast but as you can test it quite easily, it shouldn’t matter so much ;) (and nekohayo is telling me he should make one soon)

As I enjoyed a LOT working in the pitivi community during this summer, I am going to keep working on it in my free time fixing the bugs you are going to report. And of course I am planing to enhance effects support and add features such as keyframes handling…

And just a little screenshot so you can have an idea about how the UI looks like now:

Pitivi get effects, part 6

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Sorry for not blogging in such a long time!

Now that I am back in chile afer the GUADEC, I have finally been able to hack again on Pitivi. So has I said during my presentation of my project during the GUADEC, I implemented everything I wanted to. So I am now working on debugging everything, cleaning code, and even if I have a few remaining critical bugs (which could probably be bugs in gnonlin), you can use it for testing purposes.

I also started to work on a new branch[0] in order to save the undocked windows state, but since I found new bugs on the effect implementations, I am working on them.

So for now I don’t have a screencast, but I promise I will make one when I can show everything working smoothly.

You can give it a try if you have the latest gstreamer from git using my git repo[1]

[0]: http://github.com/thiblahute/Pitivi/commits/save_undock_windows_state
[1]: http://github.com/thiblahute/Pitivi

Pitivi get effects, part 5

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t blog for almost 3 weeks but it doesn’t mean I didn’t progress with this project. I thing it actually means more that I prefer to spend my time on coding than on blogging!

Last week was pretty full because of the end of the semester but tomorrow I have my last examen for university. Next week I am planning to go skiing so it may not be the week I will be hacking the most, but anyway, I will code!

The UI is almost the same as the mockup I showed you last time apart from the key-frame thing since I am not sure I want to do it this way, and because I want to have effects stable before implementing this feature.

So for now the UI looks exactly like:

What is working:

Adding effects
Configuring effects, the UI is generated automatically depending on the effect property so all effects are configurable. But there is also a system which will permit to create a special UI for more complicated effects.
Enabling/disabling effects even if a few bugs still remain concerning it
Removing effects

What doesn’t work:

Seeking, right now when I add an effect and try to seek, it always go to the first frame of the video. It is a pretty critical bug on which I am actively working, and that’s the reason why I didn’t do a screen-cast (sorry about that). When this is solved, I will make a screen-cast and post it here for sure.
Drag’n drop directly to the effects list. This is almost nothing but I want to fix the first issue before implementing it.
Keyframe based effect configuration
Saving/opening projects containing effects. I have already started this work but it is still not working. It should be done quite easily.

So I don’t miss so many things to complete the plan I had made for this Google Summer of Code, but the idea is to get something almost bug free and merge and release it (something I have been told should be possible quite soon… I hope :))

I also wanted to talk about a tool I use for refactoring python code called ‘Bicycle repair man’. It permits to rename variable/classes very easily and this through all python files of the project, cut functions into several ones and make the proper calls, and probably much more but those are the two features I actually use and abuse. I use it inside vim and noticed a real gain of productivity and style.

The code is still available in my GIT repository here: http://github.com/thiblahute/Pitivi

Hoping I can show you a screencast of all that and tell you that I need tester soon.

Pitivi get effects, part 4

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t blog for almost 2 weeks now because I wanted to have something interesting to say before saying it!

So the last 2 weeks I started an experimental branch to handle effects in the timeline and of course corrected all the bugs I found during this time. Then I rethought this design with nekohayo and got this pretty cool mockup from him:

So as you can expect, I am now implementing that. I already rewrite the effect list and it looks the same as you can see in the mockup. And I am working on making effects being per clip or per track instead of being considered as clips themselves. This should actually be pushed by the end of the week.

So afterward I am going to work on this new middle section for clips properties and effect configurations. I think I will get it working in the next two weeks. I am quite in advanced on the planning I proposed for the postulation but this is a good thing because I am still at university and may have to spend more time for it in the coming weeks.

You still can grab my latest code here and play with it!

Pitivi gets effects, Part 3

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This week I have been debugging everything and I final (Thanks to my mentor Edward Hervey) got effects working!

So better show you how it works for now. It is still quite buggy, and not really ergonomic, but it is the beginning!

Here is the video (of course edited in Pitivi and using effects). The original host (people.collabora.co.uk) is gone, so the video is no longer available:

You need a modern browser to see this video (chromium, firefox, epiphnay, midori…)

You can grab the code here if you want to give it a try even if it’s not ready for production…
So next week I am going to clean up the code and of course fix the bugs I find. If I have time, I will start working on the UI part.

[Edit] I tried the only website I found that permits to upload ogv files in order to use it with the video tag, but it seems no to work well. So you can find the video here and in better quality here

Pitivi is getting effects, Part 2

Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here is my second report about the implementation of effects in Pitivi. I am going quite well with this project, and I now have almost everything ready to be able to add effects to videos. The dragging of effects to the timeline is almost ready, but I need to work on it a bit more to be able to show you a screen-cast! I hope it can be done next week.

Sorry for this kind of useless post, but I just wanted to tell you I make good progress, and I should be able to show you more soon!

You still can have a look at my git repository

Pitivi is getting effects, Part 1

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here is the first report about my Google summer of code project. I have been working quite a lot on it for the last 2 weeks! So here is the summary of what have been done so far:

Code reading, analyze of Pitivi architecture (Thanks to the pitivi wiki)
Some reading about Gstreamer to understand better the way it works
Creation of my git branch to start working on effects implementation
Implementation of the core Pitivi modifications to be able to create effects (With unit tests)
See how I can implement effect files as described in my Gsoc application, and discussions about it in the Pitivi community. We actually didn’t take a fixed decision about this for now.
Creation of the UI to show the list of effects detected thanks to the gstreamer registry (the list was already retrieved in Pitivi)
Some talking to know how this UI should be done. I will need to talk more about that to the Pitivi community to take a good decision about how it should look like. For now, it looks like:

I am now working on drag’n droping effects to the timeline.

That is all for now, and I will give you frequent news about how things are going.

I have been accepted for the Google Summer of Code 2010

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t blog for a long time since I had other things to do. I really wanted to participate in the Google Summer of code again, and I have actually been accepted in the Gstreamer community! The project I am going to work on is called “Permit pitivi users to add effects to the videos they are editing”. The main goal is to permit to add all kind of effect easily in Pitivi and implement the most important ones.

I want to thank everyone who is responsible for the Gsoc, and my participation in it! I also want to thank and say “Hello” to Edward Hervey who is going to mentor me during the project and to the whole Gstreamer and Pitivi community.