Pitivi status update for Q1 2014, fundraiser launch3 min read

Since my previous technical update in January, I haven’t had time to touch Pitivi’s code. Thankfully though, Alexandru Băluț has been filling the gap with a ton of refactoring work: around 150 commits! That took a fair amount of time to review and merge, believe me. Besides code cleanup, he also finished the port of the viewer to a cluttersink, fixed fonts and theme colors detection for the timeline (so it looks fine even if you’re not using the Adwaita GNOME theme).
Alexandru took the opportunity to not only fix some bugs, but also do some visual refinements on the timeline ruler: it now shows hours and miliseconds only when needed (depending on the zoom level) and subtly grays out units that did not change from one “tick” to another, so your eyes can focus on what actually changed:

More interestingly though, with the limited time available to me, I helped prepare Pitivi’s 2014 fundraising campaign. It involves a huge amount of groundwork from an administrative and marketing point of view. It’s been months in the making.

• I’m glad that Mathieu and Thibault were able to spearhead the work of setting up the infrastructure, preparing the majority of written materials and setting up their legal and financial relationship with the GNOME Foundation.
• Huge props to Fateh Slavitskaya and Bassam Kurdali for the great work they put into making the fundraiser video (I’m a filmmaker, believe me, I know how hard and time-consuming it is to get this done right, especially when you have voice-overs and 3D animation involved. Oh, and all the editing was done with Pitivi, VFX with Blender). Thanks to Thomas Vecchione for cleaning up the voice recordings and doing proper sound mixing for the video, I definitely can hear the difference.
• Thanks to Oliver Propst for drafting initial contents for the FAQ and various emails that we had to send for outreach! It is always easier for me to start from existing contents rather than stare at a blank page (you could say I hate reinventing the wheel 🙂

And thanks to the 300 backers who believed in us and broke the 7000 euros bar in five days since the launch! This is a great start—it could pay for two months of full-time work for one developer such as Mathieu—but we need to reach the minimum of 35 000 and the target of 100 000 if we really want to achieve the goals we’ve set. Get involved and spread the word!
You may also be interested in the following blog posts that did not show up on Planet GNOME (but are visible on Planet Pitivi):

• The initial 2014 fundraiser announcement
• Votes: a tool of engagement and development — an explanation of the campaign’s voting system and a review of current votes
• An example of amazing slow-motion processing capabilities that we have in the works.

Oh, and besides our G+ page, we’re on Twitter now. I reclaimed control of our “brand” by kindly asking Twitter’s legal department (yes, really). Until now, the @pitivi account was held by someone unknown to us, inactive and unreachable since 2010, so it was not helping anybody:

It is now linked from the main website alongside other social gadgetry.
Also, some upcoming events:

• The 2014 GStreamer hackfest is coming in two weeks! Thibault and Mathieu will be there with the rest of the GStreamer community.
• A live demo at Pycon 2014’s poster session by yours truly, and probably some hacking.
• By the way, our friends at MediaGoblin are also doing a fundraiser (with the FSF). Check them out if you consider our YouTube monoculture harmful.