Roadmap
Contents |
Some general principles
The authors of PiTiVi/GNonLin have been part of the GStreamer core developer community for many years and make sure any issues are solved as quickly as possible in the lower levels in order to avoid any bloated feature at the application level.
PiTiVi's Architecture is meant to be uncompromising:
- No limit on audio/video format...
- input/output sizes
- resolutions and framerates
- formats
- No limits on number of tracks/layers used
- No limits on number of combined effects
- Ability to run pitivi without the user interface for batch processing or chaining with external programs/plugins
- Intuitiveness for newbies and flexibility for power users (see below)
- etc.
What is this page about?
This is intended to be a general overview of the biggest features/improvements we are working on at the moment.
- This page does not list minor features (for that, see PiTiVi Love or the list of feature requests in Bugzilla).
- This page only describes future items (items that have been implemented should be removed from this page and put into the feature list).
- The fact that something is listed here does not necessarily mean that someone is currently working on it; it means that it is considered an important feature that we would like to have. Help is very appreciated in reaching those goals faster!
- For short-term release plans, see the calendar instead (iCal or HTML)
This page is proof that, in the long term, we not only aim for PiTiVi to be an intuitive video editor for everyone, but also a powerful tool for professionals and prosumers. We are not a Windows Movie Maker clone. See below for more information.
Professional? Isn't this supposed to be easy to use?
Yes, and yes.
With PiTiVi's growing popularity and simple user interface, there seems to have been a misunderstanding in its mission: many people think our main goal is to make an application for "video editing newbies", or to make a "clone" of Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. This is not entirely accurate. We have the following goals:
- Make a powerful, flexible video editor that can appeal to prosumers and professionals
- Design it extremely well. Make its workflow elegant and intuitive. If we succeed, this means we also reach the goal of "making it easy for everyone to use it" possible.
The confusion also stems from the common misconception that a powerful application is mutually incompatible with simplicity and efficiency. This is partly because there are so many applications with poorly designed user interfaces, and partly because the proprietary software world has conditioned us into thinking that users must be divided in two groups: "advanced" and "beginners". There is no reason a video editor can't allow complex procedures (and make them as easy as possible!) while being intuitive to learn and efficient to use for basic operations, even for amateurs. The reason why there has been such a distinction in the proprietary software world is artificial market segmentation (further reading: 1 2 3).
Executive summary:
- We will make not make a crippled application. In the long run, it will be powerful and flexible. Do not think that "because it doesn't have lots of features right now" means that it was "designed" that way. It's just that we need someone to implement those features properly.
- By designing everything carefully, we strive to keep it simple for amateurs as well.
What keeps us busy in general?
- Fixing bugs. Improving reliability and ease of use is never "done". We have tons of work. Help is very welcome!
- Improving GStreamer. This benefits not only PiTiVi, but other multimedia applications as well.
- Working on major features: see below.
Major features
Titling support
- Status: started, needs polish.
- Needs someone to finish the job by integrating the UI with the rest of the application and GES. See bug #596325
Effects
- Status: working, needs polish
- You can apply effects and set properties, but you can not change properties over time with keyframes.
- We need to create custom ("hand-made") interfaces for some effects so that they can be easier to use
Advanced layer management
- Status: started, needs work in GES.
- See bug #632319
Multi-camera editing workflow
- Status: not started (help wanted)
Motion ramping/time stretching
- Status: not started (help wanted)
- See bug 593828
Fixing AVCHD/MPEG-TS support
- Status: started (help wanted)
- Most High Definition camcorders record in an MPEG Transport Stream format, and this is not perfectly supported in GStreamer.
- This is not easy to fix.
MAM/DAM
- Status: not started (help wanted)
- Digital asset management is the ability to manage huge amounts of media (video clips, sounds, images, etc.). This feature is very much needed for professional editing; it allows handling multiple simultaneous camera angles, multiple takes of the same scene, multiple sound sources, etc.
- Potentially being addressed by the Novacut team with dmedia
Collaborative/distributed editing
- Status: not started (help wanted)
- Potentially being addressed by dmedia, someone would need to make it available to GES.
Proxy editing
- Status: not started (help wanted).
- See bug 609136
