The latest Google Summer of Code 2018 is allowing some excellent work to be done on some excellent open source projects.
Among them Pitivi, the non-linear video editor built using GTK and Gstreamer and offering up a basic video editing feature set.
Over the past few months, Harish Fulara, a Computer Science student, has worked on improving the application’s greeter dialog and on adding support dynamic resizing of the video preview box.
“My first task was to remove the welcome dialog from Pitivi and integrate a simple greeter perspective that displays the name of recent projects in a listbox with all the relevant buttons placed in the header bar,” Fulara explains in a blog post to summarise his summer of work.
Below is a before and after look at the welcome dialog greeting users when they reopen the app:
You’ll notice that this screen is no longer a modal dialog but a full-size panel with integrated search box, project thumbnails, and info on the last opened data and full file path.
Buttons to create a new project or open a project omitted from the recent projects list now reside in the toolbar.
The new greeter also enables users to select multiple projects from the project list and quickly remove them, and to drag & drop a project file from the Nautilus file manager on to the greeter window to instantly open it.
Fulara also spent time implementing video viewer resizing, a key feature in most other video editors.
The best part about all of this work isn’t that the community benefits from the aforementioned improvements but that Fulara so enjoyed his educational experience of contributing to the project that he plans to continue:
“This turned out to be an amazing summer for me with lots of learning and fun. I will continue to contribute to Pitivi as I feel like this is just the beginning of many exciting things yet to be done in Pitivi to make it the best video editing application.”
Work on supporting slow motion video and variable clip speed is also underway
And these aren’t the only Pitivi improvements on the way.
In another Google Summer of Code 2018 task a developer is working on adding support for slow motion video, a feature that will delight anyone who films in 60fps.
Once finished this feature will allow users to change the speed of a clip and allow parts of a single clip to have variable speeds (known as ‘ramping’).
Linux users can (hopefully) look forward to sampling these improvements in the next stable release of Pitivi, the release date of which is, as yet, unknown.