novacut

Friday, February 24, 2012

Announcing the Novacut 12.02 components

Try as we might, we couldn't tie up all the loose ends to get our cutting workflow usable. In a live edit we can now adjust slices and reorder them in a sequence, all with real-time collaboration.

But the pieces we didn't finish are adding clips into the edit (from Dmedia), and creating slices of those clips in the first place. James Raymond has done great prototypes of these, but we didn't finish integrating all the pieces and making them work on live edits. Next month?

Doodling

In our user research for Novacut, a theme that comes up over and over is a fear of making certain types of changes in one's edit, a fear of "breaking things". And this is a serious problem because it means existing software tends to scare editors away from experimentation. So we've put a lot of work into making sure changing your Novacut edit doesn't have unintended side-effects.

We also want you to be able to doodle in the margins, so to speak, to have a place to stage your thoughts without yet causing any change in the edit. The first place we're experimenting with this is in the big box labeled "Doodle Here":

The idea is that when you first create a slice, it doesn't have to go anywhere yet, it can just hang out in the doodle area. Or if you want to remove a slice from the sequence, just drag it back into the doodle area... that way you can remove a slice from the sequence without loosing that slice. I really wished we could have gotten this all finished for the release because I'm so excited for people to try it. Next month!

Thanks to all the artists!

For this month's special thanks, I want to thank the many artists who constantly help steer us is the right direction. Of course this includes all the members of the Vimeo Novacut Artist Diaries, and many others, but there are a few people I want to thank specifically:

We've been really touched by how many busy professionals have been willing to spend time giving us feedback and guidance. With your help, we've been able to take Novacut in some bold directions, yet stay on track... because many kind artists have given us a nudge back onto the road whenever we've veered off.

And for anyone thinking of designing an open-source pro creative app: please start by talking to your pro creative users! There's no sense building a great solution to the wrong problem!

Get the bits

Packages are available in the Novacut Stable Releases PPA for Ubuntu Oneiric and Precise. And you can download the source code from each component's Launchpad project page:

Contribute to 12.03 and beyond!

We always release on the last Thursday of the month. The 12.03 components will be released on Thursday March 29, 2012, and development is already underway. To see what's in store for the next releases, checkout the 12.03 milestones:

That's all, folks!

Thanks to everyone who is helping make this dream a reality!

Cheers,
Jason Gerard DeRose

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Announcing the Novacut 12.01 components

Apologies that this is late. The release went out on time, but between the GStreamer 1.0 Hackfest and Linaro Connect, I haven't had time to write the release notes. I'll keep this brief as we're only about a week away from the 12.02 release now.

What's new

In Novacut proper, we reverted to the Python2 based renderer and now have it running as a DBus service (so we can render in the background even if the Novacut UI isn't open). We've been abusing the renderer with randomly generated test edits, and it's been quite reliable thus far. We didn't get our first cutting workflow all tied together for 12.01, but it should land in time 12.02.

We've also been doing a lot of UI prototyping, including this new type of storyboard view:

Special thanks

Thanks to Barry Warsaw for porting dbus-python to Python3
Thanks to David Jordan, James Raymond, and Tara Oldfield for all their hard work filming at Linaro Connect
Thanks to Amber Graner for doing so many great interviews, and for letting us film them!

Get the bits

Packages are available in the Novacut Stable Releases PPA for Ubuntu Oneiric and Precise. And you can download the source code from each component's Launchpad project page. Whoa, seven components and counting:

Contribute to 12.02 and beyond!

We always release on the last Thursday of the month. The 12.02 components will be released on Thursday February 23, 2012, and development is already underway. To see what's in store for the next releases, checkout the 12.02 milestones:

That's all, folks!

Thanks to everyone who is helping make this dream a reality!

Cheers,
Jason Gerard DeRose

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Announcing the Novacut 11.12 components

This was a shorter development cycle because this month we began a new release process, which includes a week-long quality step leading up to the release. The goal is to deliver higher quality stable releases and to deliver them more smoothly.

Note that this week-long quality step wont cut into development time as we'll be starting on the next month's release at the start of the quality week. This is more just a change in how we time things, so that there's time for both manual and automated testing to validate the release.

Shiny, shiny

All the same, this was an action packed month and we probably delivered more exciting, user-visible change than any previous month. The crown jewel is that we landed the first of the beautiful UI design work that James Raymond has been doing:

This month was all about Dmedia, and we made great progress there, including getting video playback working inside our HTML5 UI, all thanks to GStreamer.

But next month is going to be all about Novacut, and we seem on track to land the first take of our cutting workflow. If you're interested in what's in store, considere attending our next weekly IRC meeting, which will resume on Sunday, January 8.

Special thanks

Thanks to Robbt for upgrading to Ubuntu Precise for the sake of testing Novacut and Dmedia, and for documenting his notes on testing Dmedia
Thanks to David J. Fulde for being awesome and for providing priceless insight into my, "so how do you feel about Ubuntu?" question (his short answer: very good)
Thanks to Kelly Strawinski for helping to incept the idea that Ubuntu is in the hizzy
Thanks to some mystery person and their kind mystery producer for sharing a glimpse of what Dmedia might look like when used on a real production set

Get the bits

Contribute to 12.01 and beyond!

We always release on the last Thursday of the month. The 12.01 components will be released on Thursday January 26, 2012, and development is already underway. To see what's in store for the next releases, checkout the 12.01 milestones:

That's all, folks!

Thanks to everyone who is helping make this dream a reality!

Cheers,
Jason Gerard DeRose

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Why Novacut Makes Me Feel Like a Superhero

As a kid, I was drawn to biographies about social activists. I especially loved reading the personal accounts of people who witnessed the visionary bravery of Martin Luther King, Jr., John and Tina Trudell, Caesar Chavez, Mother Jones, Gandhi, etc. In my eyes, the superheros that I watched on cartoon Saturdays didn't hold a candle to these real-life ACTION heroes, for they actually changed the world. They played a pivotal role in making the world kinder and gentler.

At the age of ten, I couldn't tell you why I was compelled to read stories about a small woman with a big voice getting arrested for inciting a workers riot. I could tell you definitively that it wasn't about the raw, frenetic energy that defines any major strike, but I couldn't pin-point my interest either. Now, however, with a bit more life experience under my belt, I know where my fascination came from. I was electrified by the ability of these ACTION greats to help people see that they weren't pawns in some power broker's game - that they were the ones with the real and lasting power. They had the power because their collective labor is what made industry, towns, cities, and nations work. My heroes clearly saw this reality, named it, organized people around it, and made a stage for it to be witnessed by others.

Marianna Rafaele: The great Ubuntu Developer Summit organizer and hero of mine

So what does all of this have to do with Novacut? Well, here I go climbing onto a very shaky limb...I believe, with complete and total faith, that Novacut will be a stage for the collective power of artists (from Bangladesh to Los Angeles) to shine. HDSLR cameras, nonlinear editing, and the internet have redistributed power in the entertainment industry. These technologies have shown us that story tellers are of much greater value than all of the big Hollywood producers combined. Novacut's distribution platform will simply be a centralized hub - a stage - on which the story teller's value will not only be witnessed but also allowed to be appreciated in a very direct way by his or her fans.

Playing a small part in the building of Novacut's distribution platform, I sometimes notice a superhero quality welling in my chest - a feeling of being a part of something with the potential to show people with a story to tell just how powerful they really are.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Announcing the Novacut 11.11 components

This release is several days late, but I wanted to get the demo we showed off at the Ubuntu Developer Summit to a point where anyone could play with it. Unfortunately, we still don't have a nice way to set up the real-time sync, so it's not easy to play with this collaboratively (but for people familiar with CouchDB... setup up two-way continuous replication of the "project" database).

The point of this demo was just to show that the real-time collaboration works, so note that this doesn't at all represent the UI that will ship in the first Novacut beta release. This demo also isn't hooked up to the render server, although the UI does produce a valid Novacut edit description in CouchDB.

While at UDS and Linaro Connect, we used Dmedia to import over 700GB of video, audio, and photos. This was quite an abusive field test, and Dmedia passed with flying colors (although we'll be making several refinements based on the experience). We had four dual-slot card readers, and found ourselves importing as many as six cards at once.

We'd love testing and feedback on our revised import workflow, but we still aren't recommending Dmedia for general use... so as usual, please don't trust your data to it yet. Although Dmedia withstood its trial by fire, there is an incompatible database change we'll be making this month to make a "project" a clear unit of collaboration. Apologies that this keeps getting pushed back, but waiting is better than data loss, trust me.

Weekly Novacut IRC meetings

Starting this Sunday we'll be doing weekly IRC meetings at 16:00 UTC in the #novacut channel on freenode. We deliberately scheduled our meeting right after the Blender Sunday meeting to make it easy for people to attend both.

In case you haven't heard, the new Mango Open Movie project is going to be a VFX-intensive live action short shot in 4k. We're hoping that Dmedia can be used during Mango for ingest and asset management. So if you can attend the Novacut meeting, please consider stopping by #blendercoders on freenode the hour before.

Better Precision

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" will be a very important release for Novacut, so we're going to switch to it as our primary development platform very early (probably this week, actually). This fits nicely with the fact that Ubuntu is striving to maintain the daily quality of Precise Pangolin throughout its development cycle. We'll try to stay compatible with the current stable Ubuntu (11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot") for as long as possible, but we feel that being in great shape for 12.04 is a higher priority.

As Dmedia is getting dangerously close to being useful to "real people" (aka not just nerdy developers like yours truly), we're making a change in how we do our monthly stable releases to ensure that they're high quality. On the 2nd to last Thursday of the month (one week before release), we'll freeze the release branch and build packages in the new Novacut Pre-Stable PPA. Once these packages have been tested and we know the upgrade works smoothly, we'll copy them into the Novacut Stable PPA for general consumption.

Special thanks

Thanks to Akshat Jain for believing in Novacut before it was the cool thing to do
Thanks to OMG! Ubuntu! for being such a kind friend in the press... they do help!
Thanks to all the Linaro folks for being so patient with us as we filmed interviews and sessions

Get the bits

Contribute to 11.12 and beyond!

We always release on the last Thursday of the month. The 11.12 components will be released on Thursday December 29 2011, and development is already underway. To see what's in store for the next releases, checkout the 11.12 milestones:

That's all, folks!

Thanks to everyone who is helping make this dream a reality!

Cheers,
Jason Gerard DeRose

Monday, November 21, 2011

Note on Ubuntu One dropping CouchDB sync

Today it was announced that Ubuntu One will be dropping support for CouchDB sync. We already knew this was coming as John Lenton and Stuart Langridge kindly gave us a private heads-up the first day of UDS, but now that it's public, I wanted to clear the air about how this affects Novacut.

How does this affect Novacut?

In the short run, this has little impact on Novacut. Because of the scaling difficulties presented by the particular way Ubuntu One needed to use CouchDB, we couldn't reliably sync larger databases like dmedia through Ubuntu One anyway, so we weren't counting on this being available (not that it wouldn't have been nice).

And as of several releases ago, we just happened to migrate away from desktopcouch to my experimental desktopcouch alternative, dc3. This was done to work around some areas where desktopcouch was a bit awkward for what we were trying to do (or maybe my spidey sense was tingling, hehe). Point is, even if desktopcouch is removed from the Ubuntu archive, that's no skin off our backs as we no longer use it.

So for now, we'll keep using dc3 and CouchDB as we currently do, and as long as CouchDB remains at least in Ubuntu Universe (which being in Debian, it will), we're all fine and good.

What will Novacut do longer term?

We're going to closely follow the U1DB development, which John and Stuart discussed with us a bit at UDS. My first impression is that although U1DB (as currently envisioned) might not be a good fit for the Novacut editor, U1DB does seem a better fit for the Novacut player than CouchDB is. As U1DB will be in-process and not require a per-user server, it's more amiable to say TVs and Tablets (big grin).

I must admit that I consider Erlang a liability on the desktop, both because it means dragging in an additional run-time and because it doesn't easily integrate with the platform (dbus, etc). So I was already longing for something like CouchDB, but written in Python or Vala... and U1DB might be just the ticket.

All the same, we could end up sticking with CouchDB, or at least sticking with it server-side. If possible, it would be nice for our components to work equally well with CouchDB or U1DB. Time will tell.

Regardless, I'm going to be involved with the U1DB efforts where I imagine my experience building "painfully ambitious" desktop apps that use documented-oriented databases will prove useful :P

Friday, October 28, 2011

Announcing the Novacut 11.10 components

Another month, another release. This release still isn't interesting to the end user, but that day is getting close.

Progress report

As usual, a ton of work was done on dmedia. We still don't recommend you trust your data to dmedia, but assuming it survives the next month of testing, we'll green-light dmedia for general use in the 11.11 release.

We made considerable progress on real-time collaboration with CouchDB and WebKit, but we're keeping these bits under wraps for now so we can unveil our new demos next week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit and Linaro Connect.

The key collaborative pieces will be split off into a standalone component for easy reuse. I think this sort of architecture is going to truly define a new category of app that takes full advantage of both local and cloud computing resources while delivering a consistently great user experience even when offline.

This month it also became clear that we should build Novacut on GStreamer 1.0, which will be released later this year. GStreamer 1.0 is going to be fiercely competitive, particularly for video editing. And hey, how about pro video editing on ARM? With GStreamer, we can be first to that party.

Special thanks

Thanks to Lucas McNelly for spending time with us when his A Year Without Rent tour brought him through Colorado. Not only did Lucas interview us, he let me run many design ideas by him, record him editing with FCP7, and even do some Ubuntu Unity user testing. Thanks!
Thanks to Jason Smith for patiently helping me better understand CouchDB replication. If you want to start playing with real-time sync, get yourself a free Couch at Iris Couch!
Thanks to Christian Schaller for confirming that PyGI and GStreamer 1.0 will be best buds. Count us in on the GStreamer 1.0 party!

Get the bits

Packages are available in the Novacut Stable Releases PPA for Ubuntu 11.10. And you can download the source code from each component's Launchpad project page. Whoa, seven components and counting:

Contribute to 11.11 and beyond!

We always release on the last Thursday of the month. The 11.11 components will be released on Thursday November 24 2011, and development is already underway. To see what's in store for the next releases, checkout the 11.11 milestones:

That's all, folks!

Thanks to everyone who is helping make this dream a reality!

Cheers,
Jason Gerard DeRose