On Saturday, July 7, 2018 8:51:33 AM CEST, Jacob Kauffmann wrote:
Hello,
In response to the call for testing, I created a video of
myself trying out the new refactoring branch. It's a bit long,
but interested parties can watch it here:
https://nerdonthestreet.com/episode/tech/testing-kdenlive (or at
https://youtu.be/cNLjoajFUUY if you would prefer YouTube.)
Hello Jacob!
I recorded on Thursday night, so it's slightly outdated, but
much of it should still be relevant. My issues mainly boiled
down to:
Thanks a lot for your feedback, that is very useful for us.
- New A/V splitting workflow: I already knew this would be a
big change for me, and I understand I'll have to adapt. However,
there are a number of inconsistencies and quirks which are
probably making this change more annoying than it needs to be.
(For example, video clips magically turning into audio clips
when moved to an audio track, even though you can't put audio
clips in a video track.) I saw that you've already made an
update to have the default number of audio and video tracks be
equal, and that's a good start, but I think more usability
testing could be done in this area as a whole. Anything that can
be done to make it easier to drag things around with this new
system, should be done, in my opinion.
I agree that the current state is a bit annoying compared with the previous
workflow. We will need to discuss it and make improvments.
- Performance issues: I'm not sure if it has to do with the
AppImage format, but I'm getting noticeably lower performance in
the refactoring version compared to the current version. For
reference, I've got a 6th generation Core i7 processor and a
current-generation flagship GPU, so I'm hoping the performance
is more like what I'm used to by the time refactoring becomes
stable. I've got no data to back this up, but it seems like some
of the performance issues are caused by Kdenlive working really
hard to keep audio and video clips locked together while moving
them around, since we're doing the whole vertically-symmetrical
automatic group moving instead of static grouping like the
current version.
Yes, there are several performance issues, but we probably won't solve them
until 18.08.1
- Minor UI quirks: again, not sure what's caused by AppImage
and what's caused by Kdenlive, but some context menu items are
missing (while the corresponding features are still present),
the "Split Audio" context menu item shows up in a lot of places
where it shouldn't (do we need that any more since it's now
always going to be split?), the right-click context menu now
doesn't show up until I release the mouse button, etc. I'm also
not too pleased with how the timeline tracks, clips, and
waveforms look a lot clunkier now. Just because it's
professional-grade doesn't mean it can't look nice; on the
contrary, it's beginning to look like Cinelerra or something
else from the 90's.
I fixed the context menu on click and audio split issues. I agree that UI
could look nicer but not out top priority
- Bugs & crashes: the "gain" effect isn't saving my input
properly, it seems to be saving 1% of the entered value (e.g. if
I type in 200%, it gets set to 2%.) Custom keyboard shortcuts
for effects are not working for me. I had some very unexpected
behavior when layering several audio clips on top of each other;
sometimes, only the topmost (or bottommost) clip would sound
while playing. I also had a decent number of crashes. I see that
there's a version for "AppImage - Refactoring" in the bug
tracker already, so I may try and report some of those issues
over there if you want users to start doing that.
Gain should be fixed, as well as audio mixing problems (were occuring after
a track insertion).
Hopefully this feedback is helpful, and if anyone has tips on
how to deal with the big workflow change, I'd appreciate hearing
them. Thanks to everyone who's working on this, I know you're
working hard on it & I hope it turns out well.
I will try to upload a new AppImage in the next 2 days so you can do some
more testing.
- Jacob Kauffmann
P.S. Someone else mentioned something about an LTS branch. I
just wanted to mention that back when you did the port to KF5
(and some other refactoring happening at the time), I downloaded
the last pre-rewrite version from git and used that for 6-8
months while the actual "stable" branch had its issues worked
out. I know that's not a great thing for development because it
means less feedback, but if anyone else around here is (like me)
concerned about the upcoming changes, I wanted to remind people
that it's an option. I prefer to stay on the current version,
but with the current state of things, I might end up doing the
same thing I did last time.
