Cinelerra usability
Here I just would like to collect some impressions or suggestions on cinelerra usability to make them available to everyone in the hope to make cinelerra a better application. The point is that cinelerra is great and is full of feature ... but we should make it accessible for everyone
- Video playback should be tuned to work for every hw environment (I'm talking about the not stopping playback issue).
- Export codec should be decimated to show only to working one(render menu is full of non working or buggy stuff).
- Imho it would be handy to set the project format automatically according with the first video loaded.
- Given that in some particular condition cinelerra stop responding but the gui react, a button "panic" to restore a clean condition would be good.
- It would be cool to add the manual.cinelerra.org inside cinelerra and/or to make it easily accessible from the application (maybe an help menu after the window one)
- It would be cool to add a keyboard reference inside cinelerra. (hey cinelerra rox with the shortcut but I can't remember them all! ;))
- Resources Icons for Audio effect, Video effects, ecc ... should be changed in something more intuitive
- Afaik title doesn't work with truetype fonts.
- Notify when the user uses alpha and don't use correct colorspace. (i.e. chromakey with yuv8 or rgb8)
- Select yuva8 by default
maybe drop YUV and RGB, and only keep the formats with alpha? Or ideally Cinelerra could allocate space for alpha on demand... (Herman Robak)
Set PAL or NTSC as default according to the user's locale; country -> standard mapping (Herman Robak)
- Drag'n'drop with common desktop environment
- Completely customizable keys and a proper asset and media management (bins!). (Jonas wulff)
- better documentation on the effects, with example of effect combinations and how they can work together to produce a desired effect. (Scott Frase)
- This could be separate or integrated into the program itself, but I would find context-sensitive links related links to basic color theory, luminance, gamma correction, etc very helpful. So, if there was a gamma correction effect in Cinelerra, there would be context sensitive help discussing gamma correction right there in the program. Again, organized from a basic discussion of the topic to more advanced for the experienced user. (Scott Frase)
- The "arm" button should be renamed to "lock/unlock", and given a padlock icon. "Arm" is non-obvious. "Lock" is pretty self-evident. (Herman Robak)
Drag/drop-cut/paste mode buttons should look like radio buttons, or they should be joined into one binary toggle widget. (Herman Robak)
Issues that were listed above but now fixed in the cinelerraCV:
- Video fade is totally broken from 2.0. New behaviour isn't usable at all... just for some particular circumstances. The idea was to restore original one and optionally enable the new one.
- A full screen playback for the compositor.
Given that I'm not into the cinelerra development I can't know if some of this stuff would require a lot of work. As for now I'm writing them down.
I'm a wiki... so edit me if you feel to