Mark Carter wrote:
HV is undoubtedly a better programmer than me. I think he wrote it in
a way that made sense for him. He wrote most of the code, so he pretty
much knows the score of what's going on in it. But what works for him
may not work for everybody else.
Certainly there is a lot of credit due here. Very few people can even
begin to steer 100k+ lines
of code single handed, especially with a day job. That is also probably
part of the problem here - at
some point the thing just gets to be too much. This is a big project
that cannot succeed without
help.
The success of Linux is always a good model. Linus Torvalds is a genius
level programmer, but he was also
smart enough to accept help. Lots of help.
And I think we have to ask this question (I've asked it before): "who
is the more prolific code writer, HV or CV?" An answer to that
question will tell you whether we should depart from HV's codebase or not.
As regards re-design, I think it might be too heroic.
It would be heroic - and perhaps a disaster for a single programmer.
The existing code has 10+
man years in it - that should serve as a guide to the scope of the
project. My own
guess would be 3 - 5 people, 1 - 2 years to get to an alpha version,
starting
from scratch.
That assumes everyone is not only skilled, but dedicated to the project.
I would not attempt a project of this size without knowing in advance
that the resources
are available. It can be done, but it is a daunting task. That
probably explains
why there are so few editing options available, and why the successes
have been
so limited.
I would like people to answer to the following questions:
* who writes more code for Cinelerra, HV, or the folks that contribute
to the CV?
* in user terms, what needs to change?
I would place the stability and extensibility of the core as the number
one priority.
Working minimal functionality that can be maintained. I might be
wrong, others
seem to have been more successful at this than I have, but I just can't
see trying
to edit even a simple half hour program with Cinelerra. Looking at the
code, it
is not clear that fixes would require anything less than major surgery.
As for the GUI, that is not something that should be a problem if
everything else works. Blender
is a good example, the GUI is weird, but the damn thing works - it's so
good it almost
compels you to learn it. (however you should be able to change the GUI
if you don't
like it, or need to do a port).
Minimal functionality means three point editing, with basic transitions,
of the most
popular formats raw, DV and HDV (each of these has a specification
although HDV
is hard to get). You want a time line that gives you the ability to
edit in a particular
format (to minimize the need to re-encode). Source materials should be
rendered to
the timeline format. Rendering does not have to be real-time (nice
feature though),
The output should be able to display HD formats at full framerate on
commonly available
hardware .The existing code is probably a good guide to what a core
would be - source
management, timeline (edl), render engine, output. I could write an
actual specification
if anyone is interested. but the above should suffice to give the
general idea.
Regards,
Brad Hare
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