Dear shareholders fans, here is the quarterly report from the frontlines of Pitivi, your favorite futuretrocyberpunk video editor.

I will cover the following from a very high-level view (I’ll have to make separate blog posts to cover them in detail, there’s too much to say):

• The state of our multimedia stack
• Our new timeline canvas and how you can help
• This year’s accepted Summer of Code projects
• Upcoming GUADEC presentation

Also, a small announcement: for those who also want some shorter, less formal status updates and occasional feedback probes, you can look at the new PiTiVi G+ page.

Clutter timeline canvas

In preparation for the Summer of Code, but mostly just to help us and demonstrate how much of a badass he is, Mathieu Duponchelle killed our goocanvas-based timeline and redid the whole thing with Clutter. In two weeks. This is what it looks like at the moment:

The state of our multimedia stack

We fixed some initial bugs in GNonLin in Milan. Since then, further investigation revealed that most of the issues we are encountering are actually generic bugs in GStreamer. Mathieu is now working full time on fixing bugs everywhere in the stack. We hope to have something showable (beta) for GUADEC and a release this fall — as you can imagine however, I’m unable to make solid promises at this point.
There are still many things that we need to rearchitect in GNonLin, but that’s a story for another blog post.
We recently started using Github’s bug tracking tool to keep a more easily manageable list of issues we have to deal with in the development version. Please note:

• This is not a replacement for GNOME Bugzilla. It is meant as a temporary measure for our extended development version, for stuff that is too small, fluid or uncertain to be filed as proper bug reports. Once we release, we’ll move remaining issues to Bugzilla. Upstream issues in GStreamer, once properly identified, are always filed in GStreamer’s (GNOME) Bugzilla.
• We welcome your help in fixing or investigating these issues. There’s also an “easy” tag for those of you looking for bitesized stuff.

Stuff you can fix in Pitivi, right now.

If working on GStreamer and GES is not your cup of tea, we still have a ton of fun little projects for you to do on Pitivi itself, including:

• A bunch of little nitpicks/papercuts for our Clutter timeline
• During the port to Clutter, Daniel Thul helped Mathieu by rearchitecturing and fixing the timeline clip thumbnailer module. It works, but there are some remaining, significant performance issues. This is a great project if you’re looking for finite, concrete, self-contained work to improve performance with a very highly visible impact on the UI. You would get a ton of love points for this.
• We have a title editor UI, but it needs some love. You don’t want us to ship with an unrefined UI, do you?
• UI tests!

This Summer of Code’s projects

We have four students working on Pitivi this summer, thanks to GNOME kindly offering us an extra slot to be able to achieve our mission. Here’s our ambitious list of project goals:

• General bug fixing in the entire GStreamer + GES + Pitivi stack, to be able to make a Pitivi release.
• Motion ramping (keyframable fast/slow motion, allowing the speed of clips to be changed over time, ideally with smooth frame interpolation)
• Finish the enablement of our new timeline layers management UI
• Reimplement audio waveforms. Better, faster, stronger.
• Video compositing
• Proxy editing. I’m currently writing a design and API requirements brainstorming page to help plan this feature. I will share it in my next blog post, where I’ll present some of the dilemmas I’m encountering (particularly around codecs).

Presenting at GUADEC

Come to GUADEC and attend my presentation at the beginning of August. Plans are a bit fuzzy for the time being, but you can expect my typical award-winning presentation style. Also, as usual, we’ll be having a Pitivi hackfest there. Czech it out.