J5’s Blog

Having followed its development for a long time now and used other video editing software I can say that PiTiVi is an awesome app that is only going to get better. Sure it isn’t perfect yet but that is software development for you. It takes time to get all the features in and make them solid.

One of the great parts of Open Source Software is you get to see it develop and grow. It is also one of the biggest misunderstood aspects of such software. In a world where people are gripped by the next best thing – a collective psychosis of product ADD – where patience is no longer a virtue but an outdated notion of an age long gone, evolution is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Just a reminder that even products that seem to just appear overnight, in reality had long periods of closed development to receive polish (and even then they aren’t always great but for some reason people tend to forgive shortcomings in something they bought as opposed to something they got for free).

Knowing the drive behind the developers working on PiTiVi I am confident that in time PiTiVi will become one of the prime examples of FOSS development. For now it is useful enough for some my basic editing needs and every time I try a new version it just gets that much more useful. Keep up the hard work!!!

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Will over at the Miro project, that super cool Open Source media player, sent me a link today of their Miro Community site. It is a video aggregation site that allows for communities to collect all of their video in one place even if they were originally posted elsewhere.  To that effect he has also set up a GNOME Miro Community site.  I know we have a bunch of great videos talking about GNOME and showing off its features.  This is a shout out to people who have great GNOME related video content to go ahead and start aggregating those videos so others can find them.  Let’s start building a community of open video showcasing our favorite open desktop!!!

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Rome.ogv

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

Above is a song I was writing for my sister’s wedding. Unfortunately I never finished it and logistics got in the way of me bringing a guitar to Italy (namely I didn’t want to lug a guitar all around Italy). I thought I would record it using my Cannon PowerShot camera and edit it with Jokosher and PiTiVi to see how far our tools have gone.

I have to say it was fairly easy but I still ran into issues. As far as UI Goes PiTiVi is much easier to use than Jokosher in terms of organizing what I wanted to do. I really only needed Jokosher to tweak the sound a bit but it was still a bit of trial and error to get something decent. I used the high and low pass filters to filter out background noise and echo from my room. Jokosher lacks a basic noise filter effect which can be implemented manually in most other editors by taking a sample of the ambient noise and phase shifting it 180 degrees so the ambient noise is canceled out. Unfortunately the solid bar UI which departs from the usual wave graph makes it impossible to do this by hand. In any case the low and high pass filters worked fairly well to get the most annoying twangs and hisses out.

Another issue is not being able to mark cutin and cutout points and have PiTiVi sync the video with these point. I essentially had to do minimal processing in Jokosher so I could easily sync the video to the edited sound in PiTiVi. It would have been nice to trim the audio in Jokosher and when I imported it into PiTiVi, had it sync up to the correct points in the video. Manually doing that in PiTiVi is hard because of the timeline scale and the fact that it is exclusively drag and drop. It would be nice to be able to enter exact values or load markup metadata so I could snap to my cuts. Once the audio is in PiTiVi we are stuck with PiTiVi’s audio tools which will never be as complete as Jokosher’s (assuming Jokosher gets some development love). It would be nice to be able to jump back and forth between the two.

All that being said, once I planned out what I wanted to do it took no time at all to do it for a video as simple as this. It might not be all roses and honey yet but it is much better than it has been. The next step is to start multi-tracking in Jokosher and syncing it to a video. We shall see.

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The Open Video Conference just ended yesterday. I attended the first two days and just stopped in briefly during the hack-fests yesterday before having brunch with some old highschool friends and heading back to my parents house where my dog and car were stashed.

I can say without a doubt the turnout was amazing and even though not everything I heard all weekend was positive it was a giant leap forward in then understanding of the importance of Open Video and culture. I won’t put a figure on how many people attended but some of the upstairs talks were standing room only and after the first day some of the organizers were lamenting that then needed to get bigger rooms (consequently some of the talks were swapped the next day). Speaking about the organizers, they ran an incredibly smooth ship and should be thanked and praised for their efforts.

The Good

Apps

I was mainly there looking to see what video producers wanted from FOSS application developers and to support the PiTiVi/GStreamer teams on behalf of the GNOME Foundation. It is amazing to see the PiTiVi non-linear video editing app at such a usable state. While Edward Hervey (bilboed on irc) gave his mini presentation on PiTiVi I was busy hacking up a “How To Make Chocolate Truffles” video from pictures and clips I had laying around.

Afterwards I showed him some of the bugs I encountered in the 0.13.1 release and he just rattled off, fixed in git, fixed in git, fixed in git…etc. Sadly the releases are tied to GStreamer releases (which is a good thing from a development/bugs standpoint but not so good from a user standpoint given the early stages of PiTiVi) so we won’t see an official release soon. I plan on trying to automate a Fedora Repository at some point just to be able to view the progress without breaking my system.

The point is PiTiVi is about 90% there (and perhaps 100% in git) to be able to support my needs for basic video editing in terms of stability and basic tools. That should be pretty reflective of those who need to do things like screen casting and interview style video blogs. Some advanced features like effects (look at Cheese for some examples of this already working in an app) already exist in GStreamer and just need to be integrated in PiTiVi’s UI and rendering pipeline.

There was also a show of Cinelarra but more interesting is the GTK+ fork Lumiera which unfortunately is not usable yet but the direction they are going in (GTK+ interface and some GStreamer integration) looks like a great re-start in the case of pro level editing tools.

Also of interest in the pro level space was Blender which seems to be the pro project with the most momentum and features for pro’s. At least that was the initial reaction from some on the Red Hat media team. The dev’s did admit that the functionality is limited to what they needed during production of Big Buck Bunny (and other productions currently in the queue) but that in those areas it is rock solid. It is interesting to see a UI designed with different usability profiles. For instance one of Blender’s usability criteria is the avoidance of repetitive strain injury. To combat RSI mouse clicks are evenly divided between left and right mouse clicks.

Bassam Kurdali, one of the Blender developers and animators, came up to me later in the conference and said he had noticed me using PiTiVi to edit my video. He was impressed at the simplicity and slickness of the interface and how far along it is. There is plenty of room for different approaches and a real potential for cross pollination between the pro tools and the every day end user tools.

What Content Producers Want

Speaking of end users we got to hear from a bunch of them who let us know how we could support them. One of the biggest themes was that Windows tools suck and those who taught others couldn’t just tell them to go out and buy a mac (praises were heaped on iMovie and Final Cut Pro). They really want an easy to use tool, with the unfortunate note that it would have to run on Windows. One really good thing is that a lot of the non-tech content producers understood the need for free codecs. However in the end they just want a simple way to render down to DVD, You Tube, Daily Motion, iPhone, etc. and don’t want to deal with formats.

I ended up collecting a bunch of buisness cards and am toying with the idea of starting a feedback group with content producers which would get them involved in improving GNOME App usability from the perspective of those who are not yet familiar with the GNOME workflow. If we are serious about expanding our reach we need to go beyond our current self selecting internal feedback loops. The goal wouldn’t be to get these people using GNOME (though giving them a way through the apps wouldn’t be a bad thing). It would be more about getting groups outside of GNOME/Linux to be part of the process of improving GNOME. Will it be fruitful? I don’t know but it is an interesting experiment with a potential huge payoff for a little bit of effort.

Sita Sings the Blues

This good section wouldn’t be complete without the mention of Sita Sings the Blues by Nina Paley which is a feature length (82 minutes) animated film released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You have complete rights to watch, screen, remix and redistribute the film as long as you abide by the license. I do suggest you watch it and if you like it buy the DVD or simply donate to encourage more works like this (I bought the DVD for $20). Not only is Nina a content producer but she is heavily involved in advocating her distribution methods, going as far as documenting the process that went into releasing Sita under a creative commons license and in her work with QuestionCopyright.org.

Mozilla and the Open Video Contest

I was very impressed with Mozilla’s involvement and their push for Ogg Theora to become a base line codec for the HTML 5 video tag. They are also helping launch the upcoming Open Video Contest which would see the winner flown to the 2010 South by Southwest conference. We should probably run some sort of sister contest to encourage GNOME users to submit entries.

The Bad

It wasn’t all roses. While I feel we are reaching independent content producers way more than I would have though at this point, some of the big companies still don’t get it or are afraid of Open Video implications.

Adobe

It must be said that Adobe has been somewhat good at working with the community over long periods of time but that they just never get around to resolving key issues. What really surprised me was when on one of the industry round tables the Adobe representative pointed to their release of the Flash documentation as a shining example of this relationship. After checking with a developer of an alternative flash implementation I was told those documents are pretty much useless. Due to bugs, some of the spec just doesn’t work as written and other issues makes it impossible to write a third party Flash player.

YouTube/Google

While reportedly Chrome will ship with Ogg Theora support their flagship video site YouTube seems afraid to do so. Their rep at the round table stated some pretty audacious things such as continuing the myth that Theora wasn’t good enough when clearly that argument was directly debunked (the side by side comparisons were even playing on HDTV’s at the conference).

Even more of an issue was the representative’s idea on what Open Video meant. He declared that they would love to support Open Video but that it meant letting anybody do whatever they wanted and that doesn’t work from a buisness perspective.

Open Video isn’t about wild west, trample on rights. If anything it is about balancing the rights of content producers, end users and fair use. From what I read, YouTube’s position is that they are the 1000 pound gorilla in video distribution and at the end of the day they only believe in a user’s and content producer’s freedoms if it is walled behind their own servers. “All the world’s video” indeed.

The solution there is to drive traffic to sites like Daily Motion and Blip.tv which understand the issues involved.

Conclusion

Nothing is perfect, but we are off to a really good start. In the end it is up to us to keep the momentum going and eventually produce a better experience within the complete Open Video stack, from content production to delivery. The web was built and exploded around the concept of open technology. Let’s continue to make sure this is the case going forward. The last thing we want is the web to become the domain of a few, with creativity being stifled by restrictions in the non-open parts of the stack.

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One of my biggest pet peeves is this argument:

You’ve done ***************** this much “good” so you are obligated to do more (and to my benefit first). If you don’t do so the world will implode.

I especially hate it when the person making that argument benefits from that good but doesn’t think they should contribute to it.

I do however agree with this argument:

You have done ******************* this much “good” and as a result have benefited from that good on average more than others, you have an obligation to keep putting in as much as you can. I am a beneficiary of your good and will try to add to it but I may lack the ability to contribute in any meaningful way.

On the philosophical side:

Is it more moral to get paid for the above arguments’ “good”, which frees you up to do more of the “good” or to do something else for a living with results being the scope of your “good” contributions are less than they would have been?

Those questions I don’t think there is a real answer to.

And no Spot, I’m not going to suddenly quit, I just sometimes wonder why I chose to be a public free software developer when it means I have to deal with anonymous idiots or break my own moral code on censorship.

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Fedora Community Screencast – Background music edited from the song Conversion by Kourosh Dini off his Live At Bliss Gardens album (CC Some Rights Reserved)

Fedora Community, codename MyFedora, integrates the Fedora infrastructure into one interface focused on usability and streamlining user workflows.  This is a beta release with a production version to be released alongside Fedora 10.  While the first revisions are focused on Fedora Developers, the underlying Moksha framework, based on top of the Python WSGI TurboGears 2 platform, provides a base for writing self contained applications which can integrate to create one large application.  The applications seen on Fedora Community interact with the Fedora infrastructure to produce a single, unified view.  In the future applications can be written to interact with Transifex for translations, listen to upstream for project releases and even federate between infrastructures such as OLPC being able to have a view into their services along side the services they use in Fedora.

We are calling on Fedora members to test out the site and file bugs.  We plan to roll this out alongside Fedora 10 so pitch in and help us make a great release.

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Edward Hervey recently announced the 0.11.2 release of the PiTiVi video editor.  Even though it is rough around the edges it is feeling really nice and a couple of major features away from being baseline usable for every day simple video editing.  The features I would personally like to see are:

• Splitting of audio and video channels
• At least one more video channel which makes it easier to line up cuts
• Being able to split a video into segments (with gnonlin this should be as easy as setting the time properties on the video timeline object, cloning the video timeline object to the end of the cloned object and adjusting the time properties on the clone)

The only other thing I would want is a compositor so adding titles and credits would be easy.  Things like having a text tool, transition effects, being able to undock controls for dual screen use and other nice but not needed features would simply be gravy after that, the majority of which could be implemented as plugins.

Thankfully Collabora Multimedia has started to put muscle behind the development of PiTiVi and hired Brandon Lewis who’s summer of code work significantly contributed to the latest release.  Edward, it seems, will also have a limited amount of time to work on PiTiVi.

We can’t forget  Sarath Lakshman who was my Fedora Summer of Code student.  Although he had done very little pygtk work (he had done some projects in pyQt previously) his eagerness to learn and willingness to take criticism had him make significant contributions in the form of the webcam and network capture code.  He also started on a D-Bus API for doing direct desktop recording in PiTiVi in conjunction with the Istanbul desktop recorder.  That did not get in this release because the API was deemed to be too PiTiVi specific.  This is basically blocking on me finding time to review the code and make comments on how the D-Bus API should look.

All in all I’m looking forward to what comes out of this renued interest in PiTiVi.

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For my Fedora friends who don’t read Planet GNOME (you should):

• Federico’s screencast of rpm2git tool – we should be using this or something similar

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Welcome to the first post of my VLog, a video blog of the various things that interest me. Today we talk to Soeren Sandmann about his efforts to make projectors “Just Work”, the fruit of which has just landed in Fedora Rawhide.

This production was done using Cinelerra, Kino (DV to Ogg Theora post processing) and The GIMP.I hope to have videos from time to time and will be setting up a dedicated blog for them in the future. The biggest factor right now for not producing more video is the state of Open Source and Free Software tools for video editing. Cinelerra is very capable but the UI is frustrating to work with. Anyone who can accelerate the development of PiTiVi or produce a tool with a UI similar to their advanced UI mockups will have my eternal thanks (and I will buy them beers whenever I see them).

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