Beauty Is More Than Skin Deep
Shotcut recently received a major technology upgrade of some of its components. For the technical folks, it has been upgraded to Qt 5! This will make it faster and easier to develop filter control panels and the forthcoming timeline. You see, the engine for Shotcut - MLT - has hundreds of audio and video filters available. After making a few in Shotcut it became obvious we did not want to keep making them using the traditional method. In addition:
- 2 new custom UI themes/skins - light and dark - using clean, symbolic icons (in addition to the traditional "system" theme)
- extended support for high DPI displays such as the Retina MacBook Pro - in particular, for the video viewport
Here comes the “more than skin deep part.” While everyone else has been working on getting video into HTML5, we have been working on getting HTML5 into video! The MLT plugin WebVfx uses Qt and WebKit technology - both of which have also been upgraded - to do just that. With this new version of Shotcut, WebVfx is getting more exposure, initially through 2 new filters:
- Circular Frame: mainly a proof-of-concept, this demonstrates a filter whose processing is implemented in HTML5 canvas with a user interface implemented in QML to control its parameters.
- Overlay HTML: just like it sounds. You can choose a HTML file on the file system and it will be rendered with a transparent background (if not set) over the video. Don't write HTML? There is a simple WYSIWYG HTML editor included. Did I mention it is simple? Feel free to try out some of the new HTML animation tools that are becoming available from Adobe, Google, Sencha, and others.
Unfortunately, we could not get all of this new stuff working correctly on Windows; so we had to disable support for GPU processing and the WebVfx integration on Windows at this time. The last Qt 4 version of Shotcut will remain available for download for a while.
Video Tutorial: Getting Started
Playlist Thumbnails
As of version 13.04.09 the playlist renders thumbnails of a shot’s in and out points. The following options are available in the playlist’s menu button:
- Hidden
- In Only - Large
- In Only - Small (default)
- In and Out - Left/Right (shown above)
- In and Out - Top/Bottom (vertically stacked in above out)
We Have Filters
As of version 13.03.10, there are now several video filters available. Thanks to Movit and MLT, these filters run on the GPU using OpenGL Shading Language for speedy, high quality, 16-bit (per color component) linear float processing! There are also some CPU-based ones (8-bit integer with gamma); you switch between them by using the GPU Processing option in the Settings menu. This provides a convenient way to compare them. The GPU filter processing even works in conjunction with simultaneous SDI/HDI monitoring. Also, it works for background encoding jobs. The screenshot on the Shotcut homepage has been updated. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that with the GPU-powered Color Grading filter, we now offer 3 way color wheels. :-)
Melted Server Integrated
The initial effort to integrate Shotcut with the Melted video server is now available since version 12.12.03.
What is Melted video server? Basically, it is an industrial-grade media player for broadcast/linear television channels. It was the original use case and application for the MLT framework, which is also the multimedia engine for Shotcut. For many of you this will be unimportant, which is why these new features are hidden under the View menu and not given prominent location on the main toolbar. However, for the folks who are interested in Melted, this represents the first publicly available multi-platform client!
This is just the initial, basic integration. There are a couple of simple enhancements planned for the near future:
- Map the server's root directory of clips to the local or network file system so that you can easily preview and trim clips and then add them to a Melted unit's playlist.
- When you open a unit that streams to the network, play the stream instead of just showing black.
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