novacut-community team mailing list archive

[Jason Gerard DeRose <jderose@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This release is several days late, but I wanted to get the demo we showed
off <http://vimeo.com/groups/novacutartistdiaries/videos/31769342> at the
Ubuntu Developer Summit to a point where anyone could play with it.
Unfortunately, we still don't have a nice way to set up the real-time sync,
so it's not easy to play with this collaboratively (but for people familiar
with CouchDB... setup up two-way continuous replication of the "project"
database).

The point of this demo was just to show that the real-time collaboration
works, so note that this doesn't at all represent the UI that will ship in
the first Novacut beta release. This demo also isn't hooked up to the
render server, although the UI does produce a valid Novacut edit
description in CouchDB.

While at UDS <http://uds.ubuntu.com/> and Linaro
Connect<http://connect.linaro.org/>,
we used Dmedia <https://launchpad.net/dmedia> to import over 700GB of
video, audio, and photos. This was quite an abusive field test, and Dmedia
passed with flying colors (although we'll be making several refinements
based on the experience). We had four dual-slot card readers, and found
ourselves importing as many as six cards at once.

We'd love testing and feedback on our revised import workflow, but we still
aren't recommending Dmedia for general use... so as usual, please don't
trust your data to it *yet*. Although Dmedia withstood its trial by fire,
there is an incompatible database change we'll be making this month to make
a "project" a clear unit of collaboration. Apologies that this keeps
getting pushed back, but waiting is better than data loss, trust me.
Weekly Novacut IRC meetings

Starting this Sunday we'll be doing weekly IRC meetings at 16:00 UTC in the
#novacut <http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=novacut> channel on
freenode. We deliberately scheduled our meeting right after the Blender
Sunday meeting <http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Projects> to make
it easy for people to attend both.

In case you haven't heard, the new Mango Open
Movie<http://mango.blender.org/about/>project is going to be a
VFX-intensive live action short shot in 4k. We're
hoping that Dmedia can be used during Mango for ingest and asset
management. So if you can attend the Novacut meeting, please consider
stopping by #blendercoders<http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=blendercoders>on
freenode the hour before.
Better Precision

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise
Pangolin"<http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2011/11/17/12-04-ubuntu-developer-summit-proceedings/>will
be a very important release for Novacut, so we're going to switch to
it as our primary development platform very early (probably this week,
actually). This fits nicely with the fact that Ubuntu is striving to maintain
the daily quality of Precise
Pangolin<http://theravingrick.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-mentioned-at-closing-session-of-uds.html>throughout
its development cycle. We'll try to stay compatible with the
current stable Ubuntu (11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot") for as long as possible, but
we feel that being in great shape for 12.04 is a higher priority.

As Dmedia is getting dangerously close to being useful to "real people"
(aka not just nerdy developers like yours truly), we're making a change in
how we do our monthly stable releases to ensure that they're high quality.
On the 2nd to last Thursday of the month (one week before release), we'll
freeze the release branch and build packages in the new Novacut Pre-Stable
PPA <https://launchpad.net/%7Enovacut/+archive/pre-stable>. Once these
packages have been tested and we know the upgrade works smoothly, we'll
copy them into the Novacut Stable
PPA<https://launchpad.net/%7Enovacut/+archive/stable>for general
consumption.
Special thanks

   - Thanks to Akshat Jain <https://twitter.com/#%21/akshatj_96> for
   believing in Novacut before it was the cool thing to do
   - Thanks to OMG! Ubuntu! <http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/> for being such a
   kind friend in the press... they do help!<http://omgubuntu.co.uk/wehelp/>
   - Thanks to all the Linaro <http://www.linaro.org/> folks for being so
   patient with us as we filmed interviews and
sessions<http://www.youtube.com/user/LinaroOrg>

Get the bits

Packages are available in the Novacut Stable Releases
PPA<https://launchpad.net/%7Enovacut/+archive/stable?field.series_filter=oneiric>for
Ubuntu Oneiric and Precise. And you can download the source code from
each component's Launchpad project page. Whoa, *seven* components and
counting:

   - novacut <https://launchpad.net/novacut>
   - dmedia <https://launchpad.net/dmedia>
   - filestore <https://launchpad.net/filestore>
   - microfiber <https://launchpad.net/microfiber>
   - userwebkit <https://launchpad.net/userwebkit>
   - usercouch <https://launchpad.net/usercouch>
   - dc3 <https://launchpad.net/dc3>

Contribute to 11.12 and beyond!

We always release on the last Thursday of the month. The 11.12 components
will be released on Thursday December 29 2011, and development is already
underway. To see what's in store for the next releases, checkout the 11.12
milestones:

   - novacut 11.12 <https://launchpad.net/novacut/+milestone/11.12>
   - dmedia 11.12 <https://launchpad.net/dmedia/+milestone/11.12>
   - userwebkit 11.12 <https://launchpad.net/userwebkit/+milestone/11.12>

That's all, folks!

Thanks to everyone who is helping make this dream a reality!

Cheers,
Jason Gerard DeRose <http://twitter.com/#%21/jgderose>