Fabianne Balvedi wrote: > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Leo germani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Jan 18, 2008 7:53 PM > Subject: [estudiolivre] I believe in cinelerra > To: estudiolivre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Felipe Fonseca > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > What > > Develop cinelerra as a professional free/libre video editing tool. > > Why > > Cinelerra is the most powerfull free software for video editting we > have nowadays. Although it has many resources and that it is far more > advanced than any other Open Source video software, its development is > very slow and has no sponsor. > > Its main developer, Heroine Warrior, do not mantain a SVN or a mailing > list. The last official release was last july and there is no sign of > a upcoming version of cinelerra. They usually publish a new release > every six month or so but do it only for their own needs and do not > talk with the community much. > > Few developers mantain a fork called "Community Version". All out of > volunteer work they mantain a SV a mailing list and an online wiki. > They also fix some bugs and add some features to the code. > > This desorganized development results in a mess. There is no official > stable release and package for the distributions, and cinelerra is now > known as very hard to install and unstable software (although it got > really better last year). > > Also, first contact with cinelerra is usually disappointing because of > a not well resolved interface and also because of big flaws it has on > some funcionalities. > > With all that said, it happens that we have a software that is, at the > same time, powerfull enough to do any kind of editing, but weak enough > to have very basic issues of usability. > > And the feeling all advanced users have is: We are pretty close to > have high standard software! > > To learn more about the mess, take a look at this page: > http://cv.cinelerra.org/about.php > > Many of the actions described on this plan are already been done by > many people, but in a rather heroic way. If this people got motivated, > organized and _paid_, cinelerra would increase its quality > dramatically in a short period of time. > > The Plan > > 1. Get the community together > > The community of developers today is very small and spread, and > cinelerra has no road map.
We started already to work on a 'cinelerra3' (me, ichthyo, other people from IRC). We have a vision, a plan, design documents and already some code. Some docs on my wiki you may read: http://www.pipapo.org/pipawiki/Cinelerra3/Announcement http://www.pipapo.org/pipawiki/Cinelerra3/DesignProcess/Manifest This wiki is almost phased out now, we document inside the code repository, but comments/edits there will be acknowledged. > > First thing to do is gather this people to discuss about the future of > cinelerra, identify the main flaws and its solution, make a plan to > organize the place and set up for new features. I dont want to go into the details, just an introduction: * We rewrite it from scratch, but reuse code and ideas where possible * We work bottom up, first a core render engine, the GUI at last * Being language agnostic, plugin-interfaces will be plain old C then it is possible to write things in different programming languages * Using a free distributed devlopment model, that is: * for the developers, there is no (mandatory) central point, anyone can work on it, everyone is equal * Discussion is done on irc or in private mails * final decisions are published inside the repository docs * lowering entry barriers as much as possible > Cinelerra needs a project leader, an interface designer, and more > people with defined roles that should be choosen on this meeting. This designated roles are secondary, first and foremost Cinelerra needs people who actually *DO* things, then then the one who maintains the communication about merges or the one who works on the GUI or whatever gets this role de-facto. > > Developers of other softwares are also welcome. Cinelerra is, so far, > the only video free editing video editing software with professional > approach, but it could share a lot of things with other software, such > as effects, for example, that shoul be usable in any video software, > just like we have LADSPA for audio. There is already a video effect > standar called Frei0r that cinelerra does not support. Frei0r is quite limited, for cinelerra we would like more professinal plugins. I don't want to blame it, actually this simplicity is also a big advantage for frei0r, easy, fast, pragmatic. We will certainly use it too and there are many other requests by users (gstreamer, commercial plugins, ...) this will be addressed. > > 2. Diagnostics > > Cinelerra code is not very well documented, so few people have the > idea of how tuff is to deal with it. Second step is to see what must > be done so we can invite more people to colaborate with the code. > Documentation, refactoring, etc. It also has to work on the API so > other people can write plugins and effects. This is one, albeit minor of the reasons why we want a rewrite for cinelerra3. There is too much cruft which makes refactoring (i tried quite a lot and gave up) hard and unsatisfactionary. Next, since upstream doesnt cooperate very well the only gain we get is a refactored sourcebase which lost the mergability with upstream but still much old undocumented design cruft. > > In other words, lots of work that are a pain in the ass but has to be > done in order to advance properly. And passion has a limit. There must > be people getting money to work on that. I agree, but this must be clearly defined. Since it is a free project anyone who contribute must be aware that some might get money and some (probably he) might not. > > 3. Make a plan > > Based on the diagnostics and on researches with users and other video > editing tools, define how cinelerra will look and act in a not so > distant future. With that goal in mind, make a reasonable plan to make > it happen. > > 3. Set up a core development team > > No secret here. Few people dedicated to make it happen, including an > interface designer. Just join us, clone the git repository: git clone git://git.pipapo.org/cinelerra3/ichthyo cinelerra3 read our in-repository wiki (design and docs): firefox cinelerra3/wiki/index.html When you want to hack on some things JUST DO IT!, probably after communicating your ideas on irc or via mail (personal mail to the involved developers) When you done something commit it to your git git commit -a -m 'message about what you have done' And publish it to the anonymous public repo I host here git push git://git.pipapo.org/cinelerra3/mob master:refs/heads/$NAME > > 4. Bounties > > The core team can offer bounties for parts of the job they choose. > This will attracat more developers to the community. I think bounties are really suboptimal, they may serve well for 'bandaid' fixes, they may accumulate few tens to lets be optimistic $1000 at most for some pragmatic fix/feature some users want. Thats nothing what gives a constant motivation and thats nothing which improves core design, documentation and optimizations which users won't notice. If we want to be serious about funding developement we need a mostly constant, dependable stream of funding. When it turns out that a free software project can feed a few developers then it would be really nice. Just imagine we could attract about 20 little TV stations, Universities, Media Schools, .. to found about $500 each month for the project, that would give enough money to pay 2-3 Developers working fulltime on the project (any may put money in Bounty buckets too). This raises the question if it would be fair when some people get money and some don't, for me it is very important that money paied should be transparent. > > 5. Attract contributors > > Mantain a nice looking website, a wiki, tools for easy translation of > the interface and of the online documentation, etc. are goos > strategies to attract people to contribute. Its also important to find > people to package the software for different distributions. Few people may have noticed that I didn't worked on cin3 for some time, partly because I had other things to do and most importantly because I delayed cin3 for a small project providing a infrastructure for open project development where I am working on right now. I hope to finish that within the next weeks (helpers would be welcome) and maybe then we can deploy on cinelerra.org. I was also talking/thinking with hermanr about setting up a own server to host cinelerra.org which makes us free to install software and maintain it in any way we want (build farm, wiki,...), while I can't dontante money for that, I would offer help in administrating it. Christian _______________________________________________ Cinelerra mailing list Cinelerra@skolelinux.no https://init.linpro.no/mailman/skolelinux.no/listinfo/cinelerra
