First release of Pitivi

I hope you submitted this as a patch back to the project :)

This is rather high in our wishlist. It shouldn't be that hard since there are already gstreamer plugins to decode jpeg, png and some other image formats which we can then use in a graph. The only trick is to create a video stream from it (have more than one video frame).
I don't know about .tga or .bmp support in gstreamer plugins though.

That would be really awesome. PNG would be fine, they are lossless afterall, right? So I'd just need to convert the .tga to .png and even save a huge amount of disk space in the process. The only reason I'm not doing this already is, that avidemux can't read from PNG.

There's no winning this debate. If they made the tools a seperate window, all the Final Cut Pro/Adobe Premier fanboys would whine and cry that the interface isn't user friendly enough (witness the neverending GIMP vs Photoshop UI flamewar). If they don't, they get comments like yours.

I am not sure. It is probably because they want to go after the pro market. CSDI can be good if you use an app for your living, and have weeks to invest learning the interface. With 20 images open spread over multiple monitors the gimp's interface shines, but the average user is never going to do that so the initial cost of CSDI is not worth it. Regular users would be much better off with a simple interface like inkscape has. MDI like photoshop has is like CSDI but worse since you are still stuck with the window mess, but now you can use your window manager to actually organize it.

I hope they take inspiration from inkscape and make a nice interface suitable for the simple editing that regular users would do. If they really want to make a big fancy CSDI pro app then they can create that on the foundation they created for the user app. The user app would have a much more manageable feature set and be a better goal for version one of their code base anyway.

Yeah, that would be a nice strategy. But keep in mind, with video editing you're never working on a single "document". At its most basic level, there's a footage bin, a timeline and a video widget. (iMovie or IIRC Kino are integrating this into one window which makes it simple but unflexible.) For simple 3 point editing you'll usually have two video preview widgets.

You'll never have this "one canvas" situation like in Inkscape.

CSDI??

Consumer/Survivor Development Initiative??

Controlled Single Document Interface. It's the reason why Sodipodi did not become popular and why Inkscape was boosting even having the same feature set. I don't understand why they used CSDI either. It just doesn't make sense for any application except if you edit multiple documents at once most of the time, which clearly isn't the case here.

The only time CSDI is useful is when you're COMPARING multiple documents at once. Then you can set documents side-by-side etc., and see what you want to see. Definitely better than using tabs.

Overall, though, I think an MDI approach is FAR superior. If you really want to COMPARE videos etc., then you can still have a photoshop-/editor-like split-screen mode, and let the documents scroll in a syncronised way etc. If you need to see your main project plus a library of clips (much more likely for NLV, I think), then you can do that with a clips toolbar scrolling through icons, with a popup menu providing access to a seperate preview window, or an edit command.

CSDI is way too specialist to be a default mode; useful as an option for those who like it, IF you can undock the control panels and make an app CSDI relatively easily, but not generally. Face it: for most people, it's a dying model, that they find outdated.

Having said all that, I've been wishing for a gstreamer-based NLV app for a long time now; can't wait to see this in debian. A decent interface would only be a bonus :)

Maybe I'm missing something because I haven't used it with actual data yet, but pitivi doesn't seem to be CSDI. There is a main window (including the timeline) and some utility windows, but no separate document windows. That's exactly how Inkscape does it.
I like the interface a lot so far (the main windows, the dialogs are still a bit messy) and can't wait until it will be usable for what I want to do with it.

At last somebody got the point. The windows are all grouped together with the timelinewindow (hide that window, it hides all windows; unhide one of the windows, it unhides all the windows; bring to front one of the windows, it brings to front all of the windows).
I know it's been an everlasting debate, but we noticed that problem before and try to come up with a compromise.
P.S. This troll also allows us to see who has tried the application, and those who have only looked at the screenshots :) :)

Well, decent window managers like enlightenment (and sawfish?) always gave you that option, but it's still a nightmare using something like that while multitasking.

This is what professional editing software like Apple's FinalCut Pro or Adobe's Premiere (on Mac) does. Avid probably does it as well. It's the way you work as a video editor because it allows you to lay out your windows across multiple monitors any way you like (and depending on the kind of job your working on).

I'll have to give Pitivi a try really soon. Probably won't even get close to pro software like the ones mentioned above (think Photoshop vs Gimp) but I hope it'll find it's "market" with semi-professional editing work. Might even be tied closer to Jahshaka? Ok, I'll stop dreaming now.

Hey, it's just 0.1.1 only! Or am I missing something? :)

Check the supported codecs in the release notes. While the AVI container format is working there are not AVI codecs yet.

I can't tell you exactly the name of the font (it's on my uni work hard drive), but I can tell you it came from dafont.com (like the several hundred other fonts I like playing around in my gtk themes).
Hope it helps

Hmm... Looks like the good ol' Avant-Garde typeface. I don't know whether a free version exists, and the commercial versions are... quite expensive.

The origins of Avant-Garde

You can get Avant-Garde Gothic, along with the other PostScript fonts (Helvetica, Times, Palatino, New Century Schoolbook, Bookman, Zapf Chancery, Courier, and Dingbats/Symbols) from ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/fonts/, in the “urw-fonts” tarball. All are in PostScript Type 1 format.

Note: They're under different names (Avant Garde Gothic is URW Gothic L) to avoid copyright infringement, as I understand it.

Hope it get this feature integrated without fuzz.
Also publishing files for the internet (class file with accompaniyng html), so it is easy to view from anywhere with java.

This is the two features we need at work. The editing needs are very basic, cutting, soundtrack, and text.

As somebody else stated, it's not really the job of a non-linear editor, but comes after that. The NLE will (soon) allow you to create DVD-compliant mpeg files, but that's as good as it gets.

I've worked on that half a year ago, and had most parts working. I've been able to create DVD compliant files using the excellent mpeg2enc and mplex libraries from mjpegtools and the AC-3 encoder from ffmpeg. Nowadays, ffmpeg has an MPEG-2 encoder as well, so you could even choose which one you like more. All are available as GStreamer plugins, and making a pipeline is something all developers know about already. Note that both mpeg2enc and mplex have scheduling issues (both run one big loop), so this is deep development stuff. Don't try it at home.

At some point, when I'm able to read GNL (PiTiVi engine) pipelines in third-party applications, I'll probably write a small wrapper for DVD transcoding, or maybe I'll even make that a module for PiTiVi.

It's basically the same as DVD transcoding ("ripping") that I blogged about a while ago: someone just needs to write a UI around it (for DVD transcoding, there's now a UI at http://www.thoggen.net/).

How does this compare with Avidemux which I use for all my transcoding for DVD creationg in Linux.

Avidemux for transcoding to DVD compartible MPEG-2 video + ac3 audio
Gimp for menus
dvdauthor for compiling
dvdrecord for burning

Works great.

what are you using to put together the video file that you are transcoding?

As I understand it (I could be very wrong) you would use something like Pitivi to take a video file that you recorded from some source, cut it into sections, delete out bad cuts, or comercials, stitch together everything you want to keep, and spit out a new file that you begin your process with.

Whether Pitivi is completely suitable for that yet, I don't know, but I think that's the goal.

As a forward looking idea, if Gstreamer ever gets the ability to record directly to DVD itself, with the ability to make menues some how directly within Pitivi, or some other application built into the entire suite, then you may be able to avoid all the steps you are taking right now.

I'm not expecting that to happen, for me Nautalis can't even figure out how to burn a CD-R that it recognized I might want it to, by poping in a blank. (It opens the CD-Burning tool, then when told to write that tells me to insert a blank CD-r/w)

Good fortune to you.

-Rusty

AVIdemux is capable of basic editing. It's not the same level as what pitivi is aiming for, but it's certainly able to take out bad cuts or commercials from the source file.

You want a DVD creator app, which is something else entirely.