Speaking from the perspective of an end user, and someone who is sadly in no
position to contribute to any kind of coding, the major thing that HV offers
that CV doesn't is nested sequences - i.e. the ability to import another .xml
cinelerra project file into a new project as a clip and treat it as such. So
you can build complex masks, etc., in one project file and not have to make a
choice between either rendering the complex sequence and losing quality before
importing into a larger file, or having to build the sequence within a much
larger project (which brings more issues of program stability, and the
challenge of not accidentally unsynching tracks, etc.)
It's a really sweet feature that is pretty much my #1 request for CV. Here are
the other things I can recall HV offers that CV doesn't that I guess would be
goals to include in a merge:
HV does also have a few nice new effects, such as a lens effect and a couple of
others I forget off the top of my head. It has bezier curves for histograms on
the timeline (fade/pan/zoom). It has a ruler tool in the compositor just to
check lengths against each other.
There's a bug in CV where when you use masks, everything interpolates between
keyframes except transparency/feathering, which just changes at the keyframe.
(I've filed a bug report on this for completeness, though obviously I know
there's not a lot of bug fixing going on right now). HV does not have this
bug.
I'm sure I'm missing something big, but those are most of the differences in
terms of improvements available in HV.
Insofar as what CV offers that HV doesn't, well, firstly I like the pipe
rendering option for .m2v stuff which HV doesn't have. In general I prefer
CV's interface, defaults and rendering options (stuff such as the pipe, and the
way CV defaults to applying an effect to a single clip rather than the entire
track, and defaults to rendering the whole project rather than using the
playhead as a starting point for the render). Partly this is just familiarity,
but yeah, I like how CV feels to use more than HV.
In terms of features, as I've said, I like the additional rendering options
available in CV (at least the working ones) and I also REALLY like and
frequently make use of the Reroute effect which is only available in CV. It's
not an HV effect and HV has nothing similar. I think you'd have to spoof it
using nested sequences which would be a real pain.
Hopefully that will help breakdown what at least this end user sees as the
major differences between the versions if a merge is being considered? I'd
certainly REALLY like a merge for th reasons stated above.
I'm unsure if it would be in any way feasible given the people involved, but I
would absolutely be interested in donating to a kickstarter project or
something like that designed to fund a developer for a week to get this done.
