[Consortium] FW: [piksel] Fwd: [estudiolivre] I believe in cinelerra

[Ivica Ico Bukvic]

This looks like an opportunity to beef up audio side of things as well as
foster development of another powerful foss multimedia software.

See below for more info.

Best wishes,

Ivica Ico Bukvic, D.M.A.
Director, Linuxaudio.org
Virginia Tech
Dept. of Music - 0240
Blacksburg, VA 24061
(540) 231-6139
(540) 231-5034 (fax)
ico at linuxaudio.org
www.linuxadio.org


-----Original Message-----
From: piksel-bounces at bek.no [mailto:piksel-bounces at bek.no] On Behalf Of
Fabianne Balvedi
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2008 7:05 PM
To: p1k53l workshop
Subject: [piksel] Fwd: [estudiolivre] I believe in cinelerra

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Leo germani <leogermani at gmail.com>
Date: Jan 18, 2008 7:53 PM
Subject: [estudiolivre] I believe in cinelerra
To: estudiolivre <estudiolivre at lists.riseup.net>, Felipe Fonseca
<felipefonseca at gmail.com>


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.

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.

Cinelerra needs a project leader, an interface designer, and more
people with defined roles that should be choosen on this meeting.

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.


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.

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.


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.

4. Bounties

The core team can offer bounties for parts of the job they choose.
This will attracat more developers to the community.

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.



-- 
leogermani.pirex.com.br
leogermani.estudiolivre.org
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-- 
Fabianne Balvedi
GNU User #286985
http://fabs.estudiolivre.org
"As contradições mais agudas da vida humana
não foram feitas para serem solucionadas, mas vividas
com plena ciência de seu carater paradoxal."
Isma'il Al-Faruqi

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