Pitivi 0.15 released, what’s next?

Earlier this week new version of PiTiVi, a free non-linear video editor, was released to bring you some rather cool new features and UI improvements.

There are all kinds of interesting features in the new version including automatic clip alignment which is done by comparing waveforms of soundtracks (imagine you are recording a conference from several spots), transformations like resizing, panning and cropping and so on. Jean-François Fortin Tam did a quite nice video recap of most important new things, there’s not much point competing against it. Here it is:

Now that v0.15 is released, the topmost priority for the project is switching to GStreamer Editing Services (GES) which was subject of one of Google Summer of Code projects this year. Lack of GES based editing currently pretty much blocks all the other interesting things, except probably title editor which needs its UI finished (contributors are welcome). So the primary goal is to finish GES port and improve GES itself.

Now, speaking of interesting things there is something you will definitely like.

Another PiTiVi’s GSoC project this year was implementation of optical flow algorithms in GStreamer done by David Jordan, and the surprising outcome is a slow-motion plug-in. David made his own implementation along the “classic” Proesman 1994 algo. It actually doesn’t use GStreamer and does everything itself right now, because it requires compositing three 32bit float channels which GStreamer can’t do yet, but hey—it works.

David graciously shared an early synthetic test with us, but I’m afraid recompression killed some of the effect, and Vimeo has problems reading the source .webm file. Anyway, on this video the first rotation of the plane uses optical flow slowmo to smooth things, and the second time it’s just doubling each frame.

David says there could be a month or two of polishing ahead before it can be made directly usable in PiTiVi. The code that was the primary objective of the GSoC project also makes it possible to write other plug-ins that make use of optical flow algorithms. Oh, and you don’t need an NVidia GPU with CUDA enabled to use this feature.