I would like to give my 2 cents as a couple of very humble considerations and suggestions to the developers about future features.
In my opinion, the most important and groundbreaking feature of openshot is that it lives in an amazing ecosystem of powerful free-software programs. For example, the animated titles feature fully exploits the power of blender, and a good blender artist can create great titles for everyone -- including the blender-noobs like me -- can exploit.
I think that the project should work to exploit as much as possible this synergy, and that this has the potential to give users a lot of power, without excessive burden on the developers.
In my specific case, I love the ability to edit titles (which I am using as generic overlays) directly in inkscape. I am quite proficient in inkscape and now my inkscape skills are nicely applied to videos
At the same time, editing stuff in inkscape allows one to get a lot of powerful features -- more than a dedicated vector-graphics editor inside openshot could ever implement.One probably easy feature which would be very useful to many people is a dedicated function to create overlays (in inkscape). I imagine it working as follows:
you create a "create overlay" button in the interface. Then, a SVG file is created as with titles. But the difference is that the SVG file has two layers: one blocked "background" layer contains an image representing the current frame (as rendered). The other layer is the current inkscape layer, and is not blocked and is empty. When viewed in inkscape, the user sees the current frame and can use inkscape tools to draw over it. After editing, openshot should just create a derived version of the SVG file, where the background layer opacity is set to 0 (a simple search&replace in the SVG file) -- and then render it just like a title.
I attach a minimal SVG file which has two layers, one blocked background with a gray rectangle, and one current unblocked one with a yellow star. Unless you mess with layers, inkscape only allows you to edit your overlay -- you would then see the background and use it as a reference.
Other examples of synergy would be with automatically opening the gimp for editing a single image or freeze-framed video.
Finally, audio tracks could open directly in audacity. Here, you may have an audacity project where a "labels" track is placed and pre-populated with notable timestamps in the video project -- such as clips entering, or bookmarks -- so the user has the opportunity to synchronize its advanced audio project with the video. Though I understand this last thing is probably less urgent since openshot already has nice multitrack audio capabilities -- but still opening a track in audacity for editing and filtering could be a good idea.
I'll share some of our videos as soon as I am allowed to
