Summary of achievements
Three months have passed already since our first and latest Quarterly News report was written. Time does indeed fly. So, what happened in the meantime?
Michael Ploujnikov (aka Plouj) and Christian Thaeter (aka cehteh) worked on implementing the so-called Threadpool, which "makes it possible to run tiny jobs ansynchronously. This is the foundation for scalability over many CPU cores". Yes, that’s multicore support right there, and it seems to be working (plus it’s already connected to the proc-layer).
Furthermore cehteh’s been working on the memory management / caching system. This has led to a database-like storing of cached files on disk, or in more technical terms "managing the cache file in BTree indices, provide a locality aware allocator (subsequent frames will be allocated after each other as far as possible), specially designed for our use-cases."
Hermann Vosseler (aka ichthyo) continued on the PlacementIndex (which was described in the previous news report). This index data structure is now in a fully operable state, an important step in the development of Lumiera. Next he worked on the Interface that handles communication between GUI/scripts and the Session. Part of the initial design inspired by Cinelerra’s EDL got replaced by a model based on Sequences, Timelines and Track trees. "While doing so, I also refurbished the session service access points used by internal proc layer code and found a much better way to hook in the (existing) DefaultsManager." Hermann’s current efforts are focused on binding a so called "Sequence", which is a compound of clips, either into a top-level timeline, or into a "virtual clip", which can be used like real media within another sequence.
Lumiera’s GUI hasn’t received any updates lately.
There is news regarding the website redesign though. Some discussion on the mailing list and IRC has led to a definete website structure, and the first reorganisation has been done recently by Hermann, Andrew and Wouter. In the coming months all content will be reorganised and hyperlinks fixed. In the meantime the graphic redesign process will start. To all graphic designers out there: please keep an eye on the mailing list. Soon a document will be created describing the website structure, as a reference for everybody who likes to participate in creating a design proposal/mockup for the new website. Besides the website redesign some minor styling has been given to uWiki. A lot of work still needs to be done there, though.
Last but not least: the Lumiera team will be walking around at the Linux Audio Conference in Utrecht, The Netherlands from May 1 to 4. After all, audio is a major part of video-production. So perhaps we’ll see you there, or else feel free to visit us on IRC (#lumiera at Freenode) or to join our mailing list. And yes, we’re very much in search of new developers/programmers or people who’d otherwise like to help (lots of non-programming tasks as well), so please contact us if you have any interest in helping this community effort. We’re still aiming to create the best possible professional open source video editor, and the more help we get, the sooner we’ll reach a first version.