Some helpful hits for newcomers

[prasanna]

Folks, I spent the last two weeks heavily using Open Shot, and I must say I am quite impressed with the stability and usefulness of the program. Here I want to document a few gotchas that I discovered that may help some other newbie avoid the pitfalls I got into.

1. OpenShot puts thumbnails and the title .svgs in a folder called "thumbnail", apparently in the directory where you create the project. All thumbnails and titles for your project go into this folder. Which means if you create two separate projects, say project A and project B, but both rooted in /home, then /home/thumbnail will have all the thumbnails for A and B. Unfortunately, these will not be qualified by the project name. Thus if you create something called Title1.svg in project A, and then create Title1.svg in project B, the second one will overwrite the first with no warning.. I recommend that you get in the habit of qualifying your title names with the project name when you create them.
2. This same condition applies to imported snippets. Let's say you import a snippet called Snippet-1 from folder A, and then a different Snippet-1 from folder B, their thumbnails get confused.
3. The base templates for the titles are stored in /usr/share/pyshared/openshot/titles/... It took me a while to find that. Editing the standard title .svg files is the only way I found to set a different font or font size for all new titles in a project. Ideally it would be great to be able to set this in a profile or something.
4. I had a lot of problems with certain videos and snippets not starting and stopping at the indicated points. I still do not have a solution for this. Sometimes the tail end of the audio of a clip that explicitly had its audio muted on a track that was also muted, would play for a fraction of a second at the end of the track. Many times, fades or animation applied to a title would cause the title to flash in weird ways at the start or end of the title. Almost like one or two frames would sneak past the rendering engine. I am told this may be due to an old mlt library, but I have not been able to figure out how to update the library and try again. There seems to be a circular dependency problem that apt-get cannot resolve. I do not want to go the extreme of uninstalling OpenShot and starting over because I am in the middle of this project and don't want to risk everything.

Other than that, it is a great program. I does crash every once in a while, so save often (another feature request--autosave). Keep up the great work.

--prasanna

[Cenwen]

All help is welcome. And thanks for the newcomers.
And to have find something else to implement (I.e. message for to avoid the destruction of the first project).
In the todo list.

[prasanna]

Let me add another tip that may be useful to newcomers:

The name of the project file is different from the name of the project.

So for example, if you create a new project and do a save-as, it prompts you for the place to save it and the name. Lets say you save it in /username/A. It creates a project file A.odt in /username
Now if you rename the file A.odt to B.odt, you can still open it -- all your project material is still there. But now if you do a "save" (not save-as), it saves it again in A.odt. It remembers the project name independent of the filename of the project.

This odd behaviour is also operative if you move A.odt to to a different folder, say to /video. It will open, but when you save it again, it will resave it in /username/A.odt. I dont know if this is a bug or if it is by design.

-p

[shrodingers_kat]

cutting a video through the sound/ image icons at the start.of a clip will black out the starting frames.
if you snip very small sections approaching the beginning of the clip, sometimes this blacking out will not happen and you can then have the initial frames as they should be.