Novacut 13.02, with caution

This month's release is a bit different. We're in the process of turning on the remaining Dmedia automation behaviors, and switching from the interim Version Zero hashing protocol and schema to Version One.

Please note that we don't yet consider Dmedia "production ready", so please don't yet trust Dmedia as the only place where you store your files. But turning on these remaining automation behaviors means I feel we're almost there.

We want to be very cautious during this transition, and so we recommend that most users skip the Novacut 13.02 and 13.03 releases. To make this more than just a suggestion, 13.02 has only been released for Ubuntu Raring (the Ubuntu development version, which will be released as Ubuntu 13.04 on April 25th).

Most of our PPA users are on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise) and Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal), while we have only a handful on Raring. This is a good thing while we validate these changes. We likewise don't recommend our users upgrade to Ubuntu Raring yet... wait till after the stable release on April 25th.

In the mean time, Precise and Quantal users can continue to use the Novacut 13.01 release. You'll be able to migrate your Dmedia library and Novacut edits from V0 to V1 whenever you upgrade to Ubuntu 13.04.

For details on how we'll do the V0 to V1 migration, please see this post.

What's New

After more feedback and testing, I've decided that we are indeed switching to the Dbase32 encoding I proposed last month. The V1 protocol now uses Dbase32 instead of standard RFC-3548 Base32 encoding, although V0 is still the active protocol.

Most of the work this month was in preparing FileStore and Dmedia for the migration. Dropping Precise and Quantal support also meant we could drop support for Python 3.2, and start taking advantage of some of the richer POSIX features available in Python 3.3. There was also a critical fix so that Dmedia downgrades a drive when metadata about the drive is missing.

For details, see the release notes for FileStore 13.02 and Dmedia 13.02.

Special Thanks

Thanks to Simon Wells, saras fox, and James Raymond for diligently reviewing my many merge proposals.

Thanks to Robert von Burg for continuing to provide feedback on the Dbase32 encoding and the V1 Protocol Specification.

And thanks to David Jordan for his work on porting Graffik to Ubuntu, which is Dynamic Perception's open source control app for nanoMoCo, an open hardware stepper motor controller:

Plus David had a chance to play with the Ubuntu Touch SDK:

As always, if you want to get involved with Novacut design or development, please stop by the #novacut IRC channel on freenode and introduce yourself.

Install Novacut 13.02

Packages are available for Ubuntu Raring in ppa:novacut/stable. But remember, we recommend that most users skip the Novacut 13.02 and 13.03 releases.

If you want to help develop Novacut, it's best to install from ppa:novacut/daily.

Note if you've added both the daily and the stable PPAs, the versions in the daily PPA will supersede the stable versions. So same effect as if you only added the daily PPA. For more details on the PPAs, read about our Monthly Release Process.

Source code

You can download the source code from each component's Launchpad project page:

• dbase32
• novacut
• dmedia
• filestore
• microfiber
• userwebkit
• usercouch

Dropping support for Ubuntu Precise and Quantal

Novacut and Dmedia users be warned: in either the 13.02 (February) or 13.03 (March) release, we're going to drop support for Ubuntu Precise (12.04 LTS) and Quantal (12.10).

I know this will be a bit frustrating for folks, for which I apologize. But on the upside: (1) you'll still be able to keep running 13.01 on Precise and Quantal, (2) the next few releases will likely be very boring from a user's perspective anyway, and (3) you'll be able to upgrade directly from 13.01 without loosing your current Dmedia library or Novacut edits.

We're dropping support for Precise and Quantal because, at long last, Dmedia is going to be officially "production ready". Over the next few months, we'll be turning on the remaining automation behaviors, including those scary but deeply important "copy reducing" behaviors.

The biggest reason we're only supporting Raring is we need a smaller target when validating Dmedia. By our current PPA stats, we have very few Raring users, and that's a good thing while we turn on the remaining Dmedia features, just in case we make a goof.

By only supporting a single Ubuntu release initially, we can do deeper validation of Dmedia. Validating Dmedia is going to take multiple physical computers running an extended simulation (at least one week per run). Right now, I don't have the time to personally do this properly for more than one Ubuntu release. I'd rather have higher confidence in supporting a single Ubuntu version than less confidence in it working on 3 versions.

By focusing on Raring, we can have a higher-quality Dmedia release ready when Ubuntu 13.04 starts shipping on hardware, just in case Dmedia starts shipping on hardware around that time (wink, wink).

And although it would be nice to keep supporting Novacut and Dmedia on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, I think it's far more important to be forward looking and focus on making Novacut and Dmedia amazing on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

If you have questions or concerns about any of this, please ask!

13.01, first release of the new year

What's New

Thanks to Simon Wells, the Dmedia browser got a nice makeover and now displays useful metadata:

Other than that, this was a slow month as far as changes that users will notice. However, huge progress was made in finalizing the version one Dmedia Hashing Protocol, including drafting a formal protocol specification. (See the FileStore 13.01 release notes for more details.)

Before finalizing the protocol, we'd like to have at least one independent implementation. Robert von Burg has started work on a Java implementation, and has already provided very valuable feedback on things that are unclear in the specification. Thanks, Robert!

Now all that sounds very geeky, but there is a good reason why we've put so much work into this part. I felt it was deeply important that Novacut work without the cloud, that it be easy to move assets between different cloud providers, and that ferrying hard drives across the sneaker-net be a first-class way to share the assets needed for collaboration.

Cloud services can be unprecedented traps for customer lock-in, and I don't want artists to check-out of one roach motel only to become permanent residents at another. Unless you can get your data out of the cloud, and you have access to the software needed to use your data without the could, you're boned.

Although it's not being used yet, there is a new software component this month: D-Base32. It's an experimental base-32 encoding designed for document-oriented databases. Unlike standard Base32 encoding, it preserves the sort order (so sorting by the binary IDs gives you the same order as sorting by the D-Base32 encoded IDs). We haven't decided yet whether we're going to switch, and we'd love feedback on this. Please see the D-Base32 Design Rationale if you're interested.

As always, if you want to get involved with Novacut design or development, please stop by the #novacut IRC channel on freenode and introduce yourself.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Greg McQueen for taking the time to interview me for Digital Gleu:

Install Novacut 13.01

Please follow these instructions to install Novacut on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise), Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal), or Ubuntu Raring (the development version). Note that if you've already installed a previous version of Novacut, you'll automatically get Novacut 13.01 the next time the Ubuntu Update Manager runs.

If you're trying Novacut for the first time, you probably want to start by watching this so you understand a bit about Dmedia, and then watch this to get a good tour of Novacut.

Source code

You can download the source code from each component's Launchpad project page:

• dbase32
• novacut
• dmedia
• filestore
• microfiber
• userwebkit
• usercouch
• dc3

Novacut 12.12

What's New

This month was a big milestone for Dmedia because we turned on the active file monitoring.

(Please note that we do not yet consider Dmedia production ready. Please don't yet trust Dmedia as the only place you store your files.)

The active monitoring verifies that the files in your library still exist, have the expected modification time, and have the exact expected file content. This monitoring allows Dmedia to detect hardware failure and respond accordingly. Think of it like really smart RAID that works seamlessly between multiple computers and even the cloud.

The first time Dmedia 12.12 runs, you might notice a lot of CPU usage and disk activity as Dmedia verifies all the files is your library. We don't yet have a smart way of scheduling this background verification, so if it is too annoying you can open a terminal and kill Dmedia like this:

dmedia-cli Kill

For details, please see the Dmedia 12.12 release notes.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to all the new people who continue to file crash and bug reports, including HeCSa, Donalbain, Thibaut Brandscheid.

Special thanks to Simon Wells for diving into development this month. Simon has already made merge proposals for Novacut, Dmedia, and UserWebKit.

And special thanks to Kevin Cloinger for trying a tutorial hang-out-on-air with me. I walked Kevin through adding a new CouchDB view in Dmedia. The only problem is often the text is difficult to read, so be sure to watch it fullsceen at 480p.

As always, if you want to get involved with Novacut development, please stop by the #novacut IRC channel on freenode and introduce yourself.

Install Novacut 12.12

Please follow these instructions to install Novacut on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise), Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal), or Ubuntu Raring (the development version). Note that if you've already installed a previous version of Novacut, you'll automatically get Novacut 12.12 the next time the Ubuntu Update Manager runs.

If you're trying Novacut for the first time, you probably want to start by watching this so you understand a bit about Dmedia, and then watch this to get a good tour of Novacut.

Source code

You can download the source code from each component's Launchpad project page:

• novacut
• dmedia
• filestore
• microfiber
• userwebkit
• usercouch
• dc3

Novacut 12.11

What's New

This month was mostly a Dmedia bug-fix release, as we were made aware of a number of critical bugs thanks to our new automatic crash reporting with Apport.

I want to personally thank the many people who took the time to submit crash reports, including David English, Wolf2, Robert von Burg, John Prat, Sean Fell, Matteo Ronchetti, Renias, Angel Guzman Maeso, Stéphane Guillou, and kliurka (appologies if I missed anyone). I know it's a bit of a pain to submit crash reports, but they are extremely helpful to us, so thank you!

And thanks to Laura Czajkowski for offering me the opportunity to do a guest blog post on how Novacut uses Launchpad. I tried to capture the key best-practices I've learned the past two years to help new projects start off on the right foot.

Asside from all the bug fixing, probably the most noticable change is the Dmedia importer is now even faster (see filestore 12.11 for details). This is also the first monthly Novacut release available for Ubuntu Raring (the new developement version).

Cut with Novauct

Congrats to David Jordan, cast, and crew for cutting the winning entry in a 49 hour film contest with Novacut:

Thanks to Dane Henson for creating this Novacut Users group on Vimeo, and for cutting this adorable video with Novacut:

And thanks to Impaler Media Productions for cutting this short test with Novacut:

Install Novacut 12.11

Please follow these instructions to install Novacut on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise), Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal), or Ubuntu Raring (the development version). Note that if you've already installed a previous version of Novacut, you'll automatically get Novacut 12.11 the next time the Ubuntu Update Manager runs.

If you're trying Novacut for the first time, you probably want to start by watching this so you understand a bit about Dmedia, and then watch this to get a good tour of Novacut.

Source code

You can download the source code from each component's Launchpad project page:

• novacut
• dmedia
• filestore
• microfiber
• userwebkit
• usercouch
• dc3

Novacut partnering with Apertus

I'm happy to announce that we're partnering with Apertus.

This is an R&D focused effort, and we expect great things to come from the close collaboration between of an open-source camera and an open-source NLE.

For those of you who've followed Novacut for a while, you know we're particularly obsessed with our on-set workflow, and I think working with Apertus is going to help us raise the bar even further, and highlights a great strength of Apertus.

The set of the future is full of networked devices. A big part of why we're building Novacut the way we are is so you can use tablets and phones as nifty on-set remotes. But the weak point in this equation has always been the cameras themselves.

Enter Apertus. Because their Axiom camera firmware is completely open-source, and is built to be easy to interface with, we'll be able to design a tightly coupled on-set workflow that simply isn't possible with any other camera on the market. And that's exciting stuff!

Note that this doesn't mean Novacut will stop supporting other types of cameras, just that we're throwing our support behind Apertus as a lead we hope more will follow. We think Apertus has a winning recipe, and we're honored to have this opportunity to work with them.

Dmedia 12.10, Novacut 12.10

I'm pleased to unveil the secure device peering UX/UI new in Dmedia 12.10. Giant thanks to James Raymond for designing these screens.

Although the peering works without any outside servers, without Internet access, this is also the foundation of Novacut accounts system.

In related news, keep an eye on the first release of Lightworks for Linux coming next week.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Lucas McNelly for taking the time to chat with us:

And special thanks to Joshua Brown for taking a lot of time to chat with us, because it turned into some lengthly "user testing on air":

What's New

This month was probably the most epic Dmedia release ever.

The important thing from the user's perspective is that the Dmedia and Novacut project sync is now done over SSL, thereby providing the privacy and security needed to justify turning this on by default. After you peer your devices, the metadata stored in CouchDB will automatically be synced between your devices whenever they are on the same local network.

The same mechanism will be used to sync to our servers for the cloud beta. We made good progress testing this over the month, but there is more work to do still on project sharing. Between your own devices, we sync everything, but when collaborating on a project, only that specific project is synced (in real time) among all your collaborators. So we have a bit more work to do on the access control for this.

Install Novacut 12.10

Please follow these instructions to install Novacut on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise) or Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal). Note that if you've already installed a previous version of Novacut, you'll automatically get Novacut 12.10 the next time the Ubuntu Update Manager runs.

If you're trying Novacut for the first time, you probably want to start by watching this so you understand a bit about Dmedia, and then watch this to get a good tour of Novacut.

Source code

You can download the source code from each component's Launchpad project page:

• novacut
• dmedia
• filestore
• microfiber
• userwebkit
• usercouch
• dc3