Every filmmaker who's touched or seen a 35mm strip of film notices the crisp, clean-cut edges and corners of every cell. While I believe the rounding of straight things was certainly a hit style in the 90's (showing users that programs could break out of the blocky boxed boundaries of their predecessors), it's always looked awkward (imho) when applying it to film. An editing bay, much like the cutting boards of old, still need to have that crisp, clean-cut feel. It's what draws video editors, post-production crews, and end-users to any digital product. The rounded corners on Kdenlive's clips in the timeline are certainly noticeable. While not a bad thing - as I've stated in other posts - I feel this takes away from the crisp polish & professionalism that Kdenlive has the capacity to exhibit to its users. It may sound small, but people are nit-picky. Details are everything. I drafted a quick comparison in the attached URL with this bug to contrast between the two. Most non-linear editors have straight-edged clips in the timeline for a very deliberate reason, and I don't think it'd be a bad idea for Kdenlive to match this Industry-centered design, either. Either way, truly grateful that you all are being kind enough to take the time and read user's requests/suggestions. You'd never get something like that out of Microsoft, Apple, or many other closed-source, proprietary companies & developers. Appreciate your time! You guys rock! Reproducible: Always Suggested during use of Kdenlive 15.09.0 x64.
Wanted to re-open this as a consideration for the next release of Kdenlive (17.04, I believe). The interface has received many click updates since the OP, and I still think sharp-edged corners for the clips in the timeline would be a nice professional polishing touch. Wanted to get the community's thoughts on whether you agree?
Dang, I guess I removed the graphic from my Dropbox. Sorry about that.
Sweet, found the pic (see attached).
Created attachment 100720 [details] example of rounded and sharp corners
+1
Although it's been less than 48 hours, over 25 members of the Kdenlive G+ community voted on a poll that made for this, and, so far, 69% are for the straight-edges and corners rather than rounded.
Poll update: 32 votes total, 22 for straight corners, 10 for rounded corners. (On a side note, G+ polls are awesome for getting public opinion relatively fast!)
-1 It's not that I dislike the idea. But... 1) I don't think we should overload the devs. I would rather they use their free brain cells on bugs, crashes, and enhancements. We all know there is plenty on their plate already. As soon as they do this, someone else is going to conduct a poll telling the devs to reverse this 1960 style and make it friendly again. What are they to do? Who are they to believe. Ultimately it doesn't really matter which way it is. 2) In my own projects, I have so many clips and I zoom in and out so much that I don't have time to worry about them. So as you can see I do not have a horse in this race, except for the sanity of the devs. Nothing is more demoralizing to a dev than to get caught up in a losing battle with their users. Jesse I respect your contributions through all of this time. You have really helped, but please understand this is not a priority at the moment. When everyone is saying kdenlive is superior to final cut pro, then we can elevate the priority of this request. But remember, someone else is going to be just as adamant that curved corners are far superior to boxy corners. Is this really that important?
@Steve, appreciate the comment. 1) No doubt, overloading the team isn't my desire in the least. And I agree, everyone will have their opinion on little details; "polish" and "presence" can look different to a variety of audiences. Being that I'm not a developer, nor have an ounce of non-html code knowledge (or the time to code -- gratefully busy in film), the best way I've felt I can contribute is end-user feedback and bug reports. If the dev's consider this request and decide they don't want to change it, they're always welcome to change the status to "WONTFIX", close it, and call it good. :) It's their project; they have the authority to make it however they want. I don't believe that approaching a request from this position is detrimental to progress, yeah? I trust they have a vision, roadmap, direction, etc. and allocate their time however they see best to reach their goals. 2) I know the feeling when it gets down to the nuts and bolts of editing. For sure. I've also always sympathized with the dev's often challenging level of resources and high demands. One of my key desires when I offer suggestions is that my feedback (coupled with information-dense research) would allow them to create a product more users would be willing to contribute, financially, to. More funding means more time to keep doing what they're passionate about. But in order to reach a target audience, you have to market to them. Marketing, among many things, requires an appearance that attracts the target market. Hence, this feature-bug's existence. Without feedback (whether it seems relevant or not) there's no way to no the most effective areas of improvement. I believe there are many priorities when creating a product of any kind: production, QA, and marketing are just a few, yet all of these are relevant priorities. How and when the devs choose to allocate their time to each area is their business. They have contributors (hopefully) working on all of those fronts. That's where the strength of the community can come in. Farid, another contributor, has done an incredible job at raising community awareness and attracting new users. If Kdenlive scores, for example, an interview on the Linux Action Show or some other tech broadcast, I believe it would be a well-worth endeavor to have someone from the team be interviewed for PR and marketing purposes -- even if it does take some time away from development, because I've seen the impact of marketing. I hope this helps understand where I'm coming from, and why I believe that feedback like this is important. :) The more knowledge a company has from their target audience about their product, the better, IMHO. Sidenote: I'm considering this the final poll results: 35 votes total, 23 for straight corners, 12 for rounded. I think JB and the team know me well enough by now to know they're always welcome to take the info' and feedback I provide and do whatever the want with it. :) Truly appreciate the feedback Steve. Cheers!
Eh, no panic. There's something brewing ... or rather coding and compiling... ;)
Nice. :)
Git commit 82b8b316e7de4d3c5c80147bd79d7925b59a5e36 by Jean-Baptiste Mardelle. Committed on 28/08/2016 at 21:02. Pushed by mardelle into branch 'Applications/16.08'. Make clip corners square (can be rounded through config option) Patch by Harald Albrecht (The DiveO) Review: 128782 M +6 -1 src/kdenlivesettings.kcfg M +13 -2 src/timeline/clipitem.cpp M +13 -2 src/timeline/transition.cpp M +39 -1 src/ui/configtimeline_ui.ui http://commits.kde.org/kdenlive/82b8b316e7de4d3c5c80147bd79d7925b59a5e36