Last week, a flash snowstorm brought me around 2ft of snow overnight. I thought, “If I’m going to clear that much snow, might as well have some fun and make a timelapse out of it”, and so I did. While watching it, I realized, “Hmm… that’s an interesting metaphor for the huge amount of preparatory and cleanup work we’ve been doing in the past few years”:
Today, we’re very happy to announce another great Pitivi release. It brings a truckload of bug fixes and refinements, which you can read about in the 0.93 release notes (prepared by yours truly). This release now brings us to a quality level where we can let go of the “alpha” status and call this a “beta”. Many nasty bugs are gone and people are increasingly relying on it for their own projects. Besides the video above, the 2014 fundraiser‘s video and the Pitivi showcase, I was quite pleased to see someone using Pitivi to easily make a nice video for a commercial booth at a technology tradeshow!
0.93 is the result of continued efforts in our spare time—occasional hacking during vacations, nights and week-ends. Just imagine what could be achieved if Mathieu and Thibault could be funded to work full-time towards bringing us to 1.0!
Update: you may also want to take a look at this blog post.
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You can check out my main website, find me on Twitter or Mastodon or subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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5 responses to “Pitivi 0.93 released”
Are the text overlays done with the title editor? If so, this really needs to be documented. 🙂
A small HowTo, how you made this timelapse video would be nice.
The basis of the timelapse was done by my Canon S95’s firmware: I set it up by the window and it recorded frames at 20x speed, outputting a quicktime file in the end. Then, the rest of the process (the actual editing, timing, etc.) was done in Pitivi. Letting the camera produce the initial 20x recording is not only easier, it’s a necessity in my case: 30 minutes of 720p recording at 25mbits would mean my memory card would fill up, and/or the camera’s native firmware would stop the recording after 27 minutes or a certain filesize.
In some other cases you can use an Android phone to grab photos on regular intervals and then a gst-launch command to convert them into a single video file (this is what I did for the GStreamer 2013 hackfest timelapse, for example). Hopefully this rather tedious process will become unnecessary in the future, as “handling image sequences as normal clips” is something we definitely want to implement in the future.
As for the titles in this video, I made them with GIMP as transparent PNGs, as it provides me more visual flexibility (some of them have subtle drop shadows etc.) with pixel-perfect precision. Eventually the built-in title editor should be able to do such things, but we need people to spend time and write patches for this to happen 🙂
Nekohayo thank you for your detailed answer. I’m at the moment experimenting with time-laps and my workflow at the moment is to make interval photos every n seconds and then create the video with timelapse-darktable[1]. The deflickering in timelapse-darktable is really good. After that I have to add sound and titles with other software. Pitivi looks promising, but I haven’t used it for now.
I have two more questions:
Do you know if the Gstreamer tools give better results then mencoder (used by timelapse-darktable)?
Do you know an Linux video player that can play image sequences like normal videos?
[1] https://code.google.com/p/timelapse-darktable/
I don’t know, first because I haven’t used mencoder/timelapse-darktable, second because you have not defined what “better” means here. Quality depends on encoder settings, not the timelapse handling (which is just considering each image file as a frame to be encoded).
I am not particularly aware of the existence of such a tool, but it would most likely be trivial to create a simple standalone GTK + GStreamer application that allows you to scrub/play using a multifilesrc.
Eventually Pitivi will have that feature built-in.