Release Notes

FLOWBLADE 2.14.0.2

Fix Color Adjustment filter regression.

FLOWBLADE 2.14.0.1

Fix monitors size detection for multiple monitors.

FLOWBLADE 2.14

Date: March 29, 2024

Flewblade 2.14 comes with many long asked for features such as editable titles and slowmo playback, and with the largest single contribution in project history enabling using USB shuttle devices.

USB JOG/SHUTTLE SUPPORT

After some delay we merged Usb jog/shuttle feature developed by Nathan Rosenquist. This was a major contribution with about 2K lines of code needed to get things going. Intially we have support for three devices available, Contour Design ShuttlePRO v2, Contour Design ShuttleXpress, Contour A/V Solutions SpaceShuttle.

Documentation on activating the feature and adding support for new devices here: http://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/webhelp/advanced.html#6._Jog_/_Shuttle_Support

Distro packagers, please see info on the needed configuration file addition (/etc/udev/rules.d/90-flowblade.rules) described in the link to docs above.

EDITABLE TITLE CLIPS

The Titler tool now creates Title Media Items. Clips on timeline created from Title Media Items can edited with Titler, text and all its properties can changed as wished.

OTHER NEW FEATURES

Switch to do clip paste on playhead position. Previous we did paste on the nearest cut on target track, but doing paste as insert exactly on plyhead position is the established action pattern on popular video editors and we now do that as well.
Graphics clips can now be dragged to be arbitrarily long. The previous underlying restrictions on doing this were no longer in place.
Slowmo playback is now available. CTRL + Left/Right Arrow keys when held down now do forward/back playback at 10fps.

FILTERS UPDATES

Added Position Scale Rotate filter with a GUI editor.
Added new Elastic distort filter.
Added new Compressor audio filter
Waves filter was updated with effect animation now available.
Slider values can now be edited with mouse over scrolling. Relevant code provided by schauveau.
Add 'sense' property to avfilter.perspective.
Fixed value replace for SCREENSIZE_WIDTH and SCREENSIZE_HEIGHT when used as range limits for editors.
Fixed reset for filters the to do a value replace when initializing.
Added a link to some editors providing additional information on their usage.

OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS

schauveau did some exellent research and provided a solution for Issue #1134 with failing playback on many latest systems.

GTK4 WORK

We have removed almost all instances of Gtk.Menu. We spend some time to do a mostly scripted test conversion to fully explore the needed changes. The required work seems quite doable, and we will be able to do large parts of conversion work with scripts, but there were some show stoppers that need to be addressed relating to the fact that GTK4 no longer has per widget XWindows. Currently it is looking that GTK4 port will land sometime in 2025.

SMALL FEATURES AND BUG FIXES

Make Filter Select panel width configurable via a preference.
Switch to keyboard shortcut Alt + A for appending selected media on timeline.
Add reverse Media Items order in a Bin feature.
Add a default graphics length per Bin feature.
Add one more zoom step to make working with single frame clips easier.
Fix GPU rendering with hevc_nvenc encoding to keep working with ffmpeg >= 6.0.
Fix scripttool for new fluxity API.
Fix generator validation render bug.
Fix single track transition re-render.
Fix layout for 768px height screens.
Fix selectable clip colors and their gradients and selection colors.
Fix gpu test render log names.
Fix for start side trim view post-release display.
Fix audio levels rendering for old datalayout projects
Fix Projects data layouts after using close
Fix CTRL + S saving for old data layout projects
Add infotip for filter Perspective

Hotfix releases since 2.12 initial release:

Flowblade 2.12.0.2

Fix Generators rendering Issue (NOTE: 2.12.0.1 release had an issue and was removed)

FLOWBLADE 2.12

Date: November 29, 2023

With Flowblade 2.12 we are getting a couple of important structural updates such as Data Stores feature and the possiblity to use up to 21 tracks in a Sequence.

DATA STORES

Users can now decide where project data such as proxie clips, container clip renders, thumbnails and audio levels is stored. Data location can be selected for each project individually, and project data can also be destroyd per project so that other projects are not affected. See documentation for more info.

MAXIMUM NUMBER OF TRACKS INCREASED TO 21

Flowblade has always avoided UX with free scrolling of Timeline in 2 dimensions. The rationale has been that this provides a more stable and maximally controllable view of the Timeline. This in turn has necessitated having a maximum a track count of 9.

For 2.12 we added a paged and auto centered view of Timeline in the vertical dimension. This provides most of the stable view advantages of the previous approach, while simultaniously making it possible to increase the maximum number of tracks available to the user.

FASTER PROXY RENDERING

It was pointed out that creating proxy files with the FFMPEG CLI application GPU rendering was much faster then Flowblade proxy rendering, even if GPU was used for rendering by Flowblade. The reason for this speed difference is the additional overhead necessery to support multitrack playback with arbitrary filtering and image and audio mixing that is required for video editor rendering.

Proxies can now be rendered using FFMPEG CLI app if system supports GPU encoding. On testing we were getting 4-10x speed improvements with this approach.

TOOLS AND CONFIGURATION REMOVAL

Flowblade no longer offers user configurable toolset for Timeline editing. The use cases of additional available tools are well covered with the default toolset and user configurable ordering of tools was longer considered an important feature.

OTHER NEW FEATURES

New filters Unpremultiply, Grayscale Luminance, Copy Channel and Fade To Black In/Out
Track output On/Off toggle keyboard shortcut.
Replace Media in Project functionality.
Zoom to mouse position feature

CONTRIBUTIONS

Translations update from albanobattistella
Documentation and copyrights texts update from Disaster2life
Arch docs update by Felix Yan

WORK ON GTK 4 PORT

A considerable portion of available development time was spend on moving to using Gtk.Popover widgets instead of Gtk.Menu widgets. Unfortunately GTK 4 deprecates a large amount of widgets and patterns used by Flowblade, and it will take some time and effort to get everything ready to even consider attempting a port.

Small features, changes, removals and bugfixes

Replace distutils with setuptools in setup.py
Remove deprecated Gtk.main_iteration()
Use GtkTicker for mltplayer updates and remove dead rendering code
Refactor tool cursors handling to new module tlinecursors.py
Flake8 fixes
Make Add Plugin window resizable
Fix few translations typos
Fix MLT/ffmpeg complaint when rendering thumbnails
Deprecate show_tool_tooltips pref
Clone filters from prev/next non-blank clip
Refuse to load files with fps_den == 0
Add diagonal mirroring options
Move 'Noise Gate' filter to group 'Audio'
Remove dead timeline render code
Remove dead theming code
Fix on XML rendering calling player ticker
Remove calling deleted method is_rendering()
Remove Blender related code
Remove light theme icons
Fix editing for API version 1 fluxity plugins
Add translations for plugin editor groups
Make TextArea editor take all possible space for text widget and increase margins
Display fluxity editor groups as notebooks
Add to Fluxity API method add_editor_group() done
Add Fluxity API method required_api_version()
Port main app to Gtk.Application
Change Add Plugin window to use pos bar for preview position selection
Remove unneeded icons
Add round caps and lighter bg to posbar
Icons touch-up
Remove detailed profile description info from top level at larger screensizes
Remove colorized icons
Remove Edge filter group and moved filters to group Artistic
Remove tline match frame feature
Remove all rules-hint properties
Remove all frame ahdow types
Remove deprecated CSS -gtk-icon-effect
Replace depracated Gdk.Cursor.new constructors
Replace deprecated add_with_viewport method calls
Replace deprecated Gtk.TreeView.get_vadjustment methods calls
Change depracated new_from_stock to new_from_icon_name methods
Change instance of modify_font to override_font
Change instance of set_margin_left to set_margin_start
Add Fade To Black filter Janne Liljeblad
Add NVENC HEVC non-HDR render option
Rename NVENC HEVC Main10 Profile as NVENC HEVC HDR
Fix crash when dragging pattern producer into monitor
Replace Batch Render dbus usage with polling solution
Show info dialog when user tries to log Timeline range
Fix for MLT 7.20 requiring profile when creating mlt.Playlist
Fix 2 window monitor window top row layout TC and widgets touch-up

Hotfix releases since 2.10 initial release:

Flowblade 2.10.0.4

Fix issue with audio scrubbing repeating noise on pause.

Flowblade 2.10.0.3

Remove dead Compositors and fix loading if they are used.

Flowblade 2.10.0.2

Fix Issue #1095.

Flowblade 2.10.0.1

Fix installdata.

FLOWBLADE 2.10

This release took a long time to get done, but it is finally here. On the other hand, this release has the most ever new and interesting features for a single release, so it was worth taking the time to get everything in.

Going forward the project is in a quite good place now, and we have a clear path of incremental improvents ahead. We will return to 2-3 releases per year schedule.

FULL TRACK COMPOSITING IS THE NEW DEFAULT

Compositing mode Standard Full Track is the now default compositing mode. Previous default compositing mode Top Down Free Move remains available via application menu and bottom left corner selector.

Compositing now works by default similarly to all other video editors on the market. This change should make the application more apprachable for new users.

GENERATORS

Version 2.10 replaces Pattern Producers with a new Generators feature created using Fluxity Plugin API (see below).

Generators are media items with editable parameters that create rendered media when placed on timeline.

In this first release we provide 6 Generators that provide functionality in the following categories:

Animated texts
Animated backgrounds
Overlay transitions

A demo video showing new plugins in action here: Generators Demo on Vimeo

FLUXITY PLUGIN API

Fluxity Plugin API is Python scripting solution targeted at providing means to create media generators with editable parameters.

API documentation is available here: fluxity API documentation

We had several compelling reasons for creating a plugins framework to add to the functionality provided by MLT.

Functionality such as animated texts can be created much more easily using Python and rendered media.
Some MLT functionality is unavailable for Flowblade because QT based MLT services crash the application.
Contributing threshold for creating new Generators should be very low for since only a single self contained file is needed to do a meaningful contribution.

NEW KEYFRAME INTERPOLATION MODES

Previously we only provided Linear value interpolations between keyframes, but with this release we make Smooth and Discrete keyframe interpolations available too.

GPU RENDERING

We now have GPU encoding available for some formats:

AMD/Intel cards - VAAPI h264 encoding
NVidia cards - NVENC HEVC encoding, NVENC h264 encoding

Options will be available in Render panel if test renders on start-up complete successfully.

NEW DEFAULT THEME

We have a new dark default theme. The previous default theme and the other available themes were removed. System dark and light themes were also removed because the new Gnome global dark preference setting caused application window to become invsible in some cases.

CONTRIBUTIONS

jep-fa: Keyframe Tool keyframe level editing feature. Control +Left Mouse press and drag between two keyframes sets same value to both. This likely going to be very handy when e-g- working with audio levels.
Ümit Solmaz provided new turkish language support.
jep-fa: Creating missing files in Media Relinker feature. When using Media Relinker to fix projects with missing media user can now create place holder files directly with Media Relinker dialog.
Albano Battistella updated italian translation.
Pavel Fric updated czech translation.
Martin A. Wielebinski updated german translation.
Николай Смольянинов updated the Russian translation
jep-fa Titler : remove spaces and new line characters at start of the name of the layer

GUI UPDATES

New Edit panel. Dedicated edit panels for Filters and Compositors have been combined into single 'Edit' panel. Generator properties are also edited in this panel.
New Encoding Options selector Encoding options are now presented using a categorised combo box allowing e.g. more clearly differentiating the new GPU rendering options.
New Profile selector Project Profile options are now presented using a categorised combo box.
Move Tools buttons to top bar Buttons for launching G'Mic editor, Audio Monitor etc. have been moved from Middlebar to top menu bar.
Mouse prelight Pressable icons now prelight under mouse improving UI interactivity.
Preset Layouts There are now preset layouts avaialeble from a button in top menu bar.
Combine freebar and layouts functionality Middlebar buttons editing and layout selections functionality have been combined.
Multiclip selection pop-up menu A new menu with actions that can be applied to multiple clips is presented when multiple clips are selected on timeline and a context menu is opened with mouse right click.
Keyframe editor hamburger menus Keyframe editors now have a hamburger menus adding new functionality and replacing old menus accessed via keyframe icons on sides.
Keyframe Interpolation right click menu Keyframes now have right click context menus with options to set keyframe interpolation.

Other new features

Quick Filter Keyboard Shortcuts Keyboard Shortcuts dialog now provides possibility to set up to 12 Quick Filters available using Control + F(1-12) key combo.
Add Media Folder feature allows user to import multiple media items from a folder in a single action. User can control file type and maximum numbers of files to be added.
Blend Mode filters When using the new default compositing mode 'Standard Full Track' compositing mode is now controlled by adding a new Blend Mode filter.
New Filters: Trails, Glitch, Choppy, RGB Shift.
Add markers during playback using feature.
Q and W keyboard shortcuts for quick trimming clip ends.
Save/Load Effect Stack functionality has been added.
Looping playback Looping range is set by setting Mark In and Mark Out on timeline.

UX Papercuts

Support CTRL+X for media files and timeline clips.
Autoexpand track on first added clip.
Keep timeline centered on zoom if possible.
Allow box selection from blank clip with Move tool.
Make mouse wheel sideways scroll step zoom level dependent.
Make Move tool box selection snap too.
Add Resync Track -edit action and keyboard shortcut for it.
Make split and sync split edits for clip ranges consolidated and available from multiselection pop-up.
Auto seek to clip first frame on clip opened in filter editor.
Auto expand latest added filter when clip opened in filter editor.
Exit other then default tools on empty click.
Make clip ends snap correctly.
Multiple menu updates including main menu and clip context menu.
Move playhead to clip start when clip opened in editor.
Make Move tool box selection on empty press behaviour always on, update tooltip.
Turn single track box selection into range selection.
Add drag'n'drop filter on all selected clips if dropped on selected range.
Make Media Panel Shift + Mouse selection work in standard way.

Removed features

Quite a few features were removed to tighten up the design and codebase. Some may be later re-introduced if there is singficant demand.

Drop Blue and Grey themes.
Remove rendered fade and color dip functionalities.
Drop Blender containers.
Removed Autofollow composition mode.
Removed feature to display audio levels only on single clips.
Removed fade compositors.
Dropped film emulation LUTs from G'Mic tool
Drop Pattern Producers, replaced by Generators.

These two we hope to bring back later:

Dropped timeline rendering feature.
Dropped Save Snapshot... feature.

Small features, changes and updates

Use outline to indicate media item selection
Add copy/paste items to keyframe editor menus
Marks GUI update
Improve sync info GUI on clips
Monitor area layout change
Pos bar look update
Clips colors update
Tighten up slider editor GUI
Enable markers for audio clips
Zoom to project length and pos 0 on sequence open
Enable drag'n'drop for range log items into monitor
Add feature to show Range Log items in monitor with range marked
Add keyboard shortcut for rendering timeline ranges
Make many processes use mltinit.py
Clear GLib dependency from renderconsumer
Delete unncessery imports from mltenv.py
Port everything except main app to Gtk.Application
Remove Gdk.Screen usage
Use GLib.timeout_add instead of Gdk.threads_add_timeout
Remove audiowaveform.py module
Audio mime type fixes
Remove Gtk, Gdk dependency from utils.py
Remove threads enter/leave from everything except main app
Add 'Center' action for geometry editors
Add clone filters feature for audio clips
Remove imgseq ?begin version
Change defaults to favor showing playhead on stop
Change Image Clip Color on default theme.
Jobs info texts update
Make Runtime dialog bigger and resizable
More HiDPI work, @2 buttons work, add some @2 icons for buttons
Keyframe Tool GUI and menu updates
Show info dialog when creating too large custom layouts
Drop force_small_midbar pref and fix midbar to always work with w >= 1280 screens
Add filter add menu to Effects editor panel
Don't display project name in top level project panel
Fix themes having tabs properties bleeding from system theme
Fullscreen button functionality
Display info on modified audio levels in Tracks column
Tighten multiple GUI elements
Clone only active filter with copy/paste
Add Recreate Icon feature for Media Items
Do not accept non-seekable video files
Make render with args work with values containing equals sign
Do not open non-seekable audio files
Refuse to load files with non-media extensions.
Drop Pattern Producers
Add 10% view size into geometry editors
Make Range Log text column wider and ellipsized
Add drag'n'drop filter on all selected clips if dropped on selected range
Optimize Dark Theme colors for Yaru and Adwaita instead of Arc-Dark
Make Ubuntu theme selected color work with Yaru
select-next - prev clip, select-next - forward
Make load dialog more interactive
Thin edit panels 40px
Import mlt7 as mlt if the available mlt is presented as mlt7
flake8 fixes
Use Icon to mark active Sequence
cairoarea: replace deprecated Gdk.EventMask.POINTER_MOTION_HINT_MASK with Gdk.EventMask.POINTER_MOTION_MASK, fixes GMicButtons issue
Timeline waveform display touch-ups
Add snapping to playhead

BUG FIXES

Clear keyframe editors on clear_clip() to avoid failing callbacks on discarded editors
Fix CairoColorProperty
Don't crash if setting dark theme preference fails.
Fix media timline drag'n'drop when starting from multiple selection
Panel positioning fixes for two windows mode
Clear keyframes editors update list when initing Keyframe Tool
Fix updating custom shortcuts files
Fix media bin multi dnd (?) onko uusi regressio tässä cyclessä
Fix Keyframe Tool draw off-by-one bug
Fix removed monitor start-up crash
Fix image sequence Container Clip loading
Keep names same for rendered Container Clips
Fix Issue #870 with Home and End keys
Make images and color clips respect Mark In and Mark Out when dropping on timeline
Fix numerical entry issues with geometry editors
Fix issue in forum question 110
Fix updating tooldock when tool selection changes
Stop container clips from being able to prevent loading media files because of duplicate check
Remove profile selection from container clips rendering, always use project profile.
Fix issue #990 by adding missing tabs position default value
Fix adding named Sequence
Fix G'Mic video render stopping bug
Fix loading User profiles
Update edited sequence name in top row
Fixes on profiles widgets after profile changes by user
Fix ESC updating for tool dock
Fix selection clip creation GUI update bug
Fix monitor media drag
Fix bins update after adding pattern producer
Make clip end drags respect track locking
Fix clip drag out of tline bug when range panel missed
Fix project load in systems with 'import mlt7' if project data saved in system with
import mlt' Janne Liljeblad
Remove mlt.mlt_image_rgb24a definition from monitorwidget.py
Fix setting audio levels to 0 in audiomonitoring.py
Fix ToolSelector re-init after middlebar configuration
Fix multitrim overlay bug when entered with key press
Fix re-render rendered transitions
Fix rendered transitions
Fix kfeditors for clip end drags
Fix filter undo/redo edit panel updates
Fix effect drop on range
Fix compositor and generator edit panels visibility through edits
Set Save menu item sensitivity always correctly after first video load

FLOWBLADE 2.8

Date: February 9, 2021

In this development cycle we focused on making the application more configurable. Among other new features we made panels layout, keyboard shortcuts and middlebar customizable.

CONFIGURABLE PANEL POSITIONING

For the first time it is now possible to change the layout of the application by moving panels to different positions using View->Panel Placement submenu. Currently the feature is only available for screens with resolution of 1680 x 1050 and up.

NEW THEMES

Application look'n'feel was updated by adding two new custom themes.

Flowblade Neutral is a dark theme with equal RGB values for all hues providing a neutral background. Screenshot
Flowblade Gray is a dark theme with very light blue tint. Screenshot
Previous default theme remains available as Flowblade Blue.

FREEBAR

jep-fa provided a feature allowing users to select which items in Middlebar are displayed and in which order. Feature is available by selecting View->Middlebar layout->Free Bar and then View->Middlebar layout->Configure Free Bar....

CONFIGURABLE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

A subset of keyboard shortcuts can now be changed. From the hamburger menu in Keyboard Shortcuts dialog select Add Custom Shortcuts Group and click on gear icons to set shortcuts.

TOOLDOCK

User can now optionally use Tool Dock widget to select Timeline Edit Tools instead of the middlebar drop down menu.

FILTER EDIT PANEL UPDATE

Filter panel was updated. The previous left side Filter Stack and Filter Selection list boxes were removed in favor of the more common approach of having Filter Edit Panels themselves being arranged in stack.

NEW FILTER SELECT PANEL

Filter Selection panel was moved to right side of the Timeline. User can add filters by double clicking on filter items or by doing a drag-and-drop on top of Timeline Clips.

COLOR ICONS

jep-fa provided a set colored of icons to be optionally used in the Middlebar with Николай Смольянинов providing some additional contributions. The feature provides a differentiated, bright and colorful look for users who prefer it.

OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS

Relink a directory feature for Media Relinker contributed by jep-fa
GitHub Actions build workflow contributed by Dan Dennedy.
Fix broken 'ui' object references in editorwindow.py Nathan Rosenquist.
startup: support usr-merge by sgn.
Don't use legacy directory for Appstream metadata City-busz.

NEW FRENCH USER MANUAL

jep-fa created a new French language user manual with large amount of up-to-date screenshots and icons shown and explained. The manual is substantially longer and more detailed then the current user manual and it might very well be worth the effort to translate this to English to use it as the new project official user guide.

TRANSLATIONS UPDATES

Николай Смольянинов updated the Russian translation
jep-fa updated the French translation
micitabesh updated the Ukrainian translation
Stanisław Polak updated the Polish translation

OTHER CHANGES

MultipartFilterObject filters were decracated and replaced with standard filters.
Cutting clips now keep filters and mute state of original clips on both new clips.
Gradient and Shadow blur features were added into Titler.
Color Picker feature for selecting colors from monitor was added into color selection widgets.

NEXT CYCLE PLANS

In next cycle we plan among other things to improve the current rendering functionality and create a new scripting tool for creating custom effects, transitions and rendered backgrounds.

BUG FIXES AND OTHER CHANGES

Fix Issue #969 with non-updating LADSPA filters
Fix problems with using Range Log in Proxy Mode
Fix Issue #960 with Range Log treeview failing to hold scroll position after adding item
Load project even if container clip fails to make media item icon, Issue #919
Drop support for G'Mic version 1, fixes Issue #900
Drop word 'Pan' from Audio Mixer and use icon instead
Fix FilterRectGeometryEditor mouse scroll zoom
Fix Range Log Delete key action
Don't draw out of clip range clip markers
Make Titler layer list treeview selection follow state
Drop H.264 for single track rendered fades/transitions
Fix trim view second image
Change Titler to use left side checkboxes
Change top level checkboxes to be on left
900px height screen render panel GUI fix
Refuse to open animated GIF files
Fix Issue #941 with crashing renders when using H.264 and timeline having blanks
Make possible to change aspect ratio with Position Scale filter
Fix X and Y scale in Rotate and Shear filters, Issue #943
Add module persistancecompat.py and refactor compatibility code into it
Add code to try to open moved proxy projects
mime: add icon, fixes #905 eszlari
Remove deprecated getiterator() method
Keep Titler open but re-init for screensize on project load
Add offline docs as .pdf and .docx files
Make second window fullscreen with F11 if it has toplevel focus
Fix intro dialog typo, Issue #921

Flowblade 2.6.3

Date: October 27, 2020

This is a bug fix release.

fixes Color Clip load crash regression in 2.6.1

Flowblade 2.6.1

Date: October 14, 2020

This is a bug fix release.

Flatpak: Fix broken Jobs rendering - Proxy, SlowMotion, Reverse, Container Clips
Fix autosave bug #891 with Control + S saves going into old autosave file
hfiguiere and eszlari: Flatpak - Remove deprecated non-unified plugins
Make Delete Editor activate Save button too on Blender program editor
Use self.render_player.wait_for_producer_end_stop = True for G'Mic video rendering
Switch tlinerender to use Flatpak app-id dbus names
Make unused missing asset launch relinker too
Николай Смольянинов: UpdateRussian translations
Mark Mandel: Add Paste Filter shortcut (in docs)
Balló György: Install subdirectories of help
Fix bug in simpleexitors.py

Flowblade 2.6

Date: July 5, 2020

This is the second Python 3 release of the application. This time we introduced a quite large amount of new functionality like Container Clips and async rendering of resources using Jobs panel.

TECHNICAL ISSUES

MLT 6.18 or higher is now required.
Application requires XDG user folder information to run, using dot folders as backup is no longer supported
Flatpak does not support all features, Batch Rendering and Blender Container Clips are currently not available in Flowblade Flatpak. We aim to do a point release in August addressing these issues.

COMPOSITING CHANGES

In 2.4 for we added the concept of Compositing Modes enabling user to select between different ways of creating composited images. In this release we complete the approach by adding a new Compositing Mode Standard Full Track.

Standard Full Track Compositing Mode - no Compositors needed

The shortest way to describe this compositing mode is "What everyone else does". No Compositors are needed to create composited images in this Compositing mode.

We made a tutorial video explaining using Compositing Modes here.

User documentation on Compositing Modes is here.

Other Composing Mode changes

Top Down Auto Follow Compositing Mode was removed. This mode did not offer any sufficiently differetiated functionality to justify additional complexity.
Compositing Mode can now be selected from a menu in the bottom left corner.

Making Standard Full Track the default Compositing Mode in the future

We are considering making the new Compositing Mode Standard Full Track the default for new projects, anyone having an opinion on this can comment here.

CONTAINER CLIPS

We introduced a new Media and Timeline object called a Container Clip.

There is a lengthy explanation on the rationale and usage of Container Clips in user documentation here.

This is only the first iteration on the idea to get things going. Later we will be adding at least a Python based scripting tool and Natron project file Container Clips.

For 2.8 we will introduce a central repository where users can contribute and share Container Clip resources.

Compound Clips are now Selection Container Clips

Clips made from selections were previously called Compound Clips. Now they are one type of Container Clips and Compound Clips naming is no longer used.

TIMELINE RENDERING

We now offer a functionality to render one or more parts of timeline in case there are performance problems in some areas. Related user documentation is here.

JOBS PANEL

Adding Container Clips necessitated proving a way to launch, observe and abort asynchronous renders other then the existing Batch Rendering functionality.

Proxy Clip rendering and rendering of Motion/Reverse clips are now asynchronous jobs instead of the previous approach where they were modal renders.

Functionality is provided in a new Jobs panel.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Albano Battistella

updated italian translation

驿窗

updated Chinese translation

micitabesh

updated Ukrainian translations

Николай Смольянинов

Updated Russian translation
Fixed "start key" to "home key"

jep-fa

Add a list of the unused files as a new Media Panel view category.
New optional playback buttons To Start/To End to go to start or end of timeline.
75 pixels high tracks option. These larger tracks can look nicer and clearer in many situations.

Pascal de Bruijn

add Lines filter
add Dust filter
move Grain from group Blur to Artistic
libmp3lame over ffmpeg's aac
renderencoding: minor consistency changes

dvdlvr

Add sturdier code for missing @2 icons
Added compositor_icon@2

imaami

Fix crash on loading a project with color clips

OTHER NEW FEATURES

Partial filter application with filter masks.
Clips can reload clip media from disk now.
Steal frames for rendered transitions feature.
No confirm dialog asked on project exit if nothing has been changed.
Rotomask Curve/Line type selection is now a persistent property.
New keyboard shrtcuts:
- Alt + R is shortcut for Resync now, S no longer works for this.
- Clear Filters was changed to Alt + C.
- Alt + K for clear Mark In/Out.
- Alt + I/O is now Display going to mark in/out for all usecases, Shift + Shift + I/O still works users who prefer .
Position bar now shows timeline markers.
Disk cache size warning. If Flowblade takes over 500MB space on disk user will be informed.
Range Overwrite edit action now works when only Timeline Mark Out defined.
It is now possible to change render path of a render item in Batch Render window.

FOCUS AREAS FOR NEXT DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

We are moving to feature branch development model so master can have quite long pauses before new work appears there.
Work on SDL 1.2 replacement. We got SDL 2 software rendering video display working but the performance was much worse then what we have now. Next we will look to develop SDL2/OpenGL based solution
Improved GUI configuration. Now that we have made editing tool set, workflow and compositing model user configurable we will continue to make keyboard shortcuts, middlebar contents and window layout configurable.
Container Clips work with Natron and Python script tool features planned.
Work on Issue list.
There will no summer shutdown this year, we will remain active on PRs and Issue list, but on July there will probably be relatively few new patches.

BUG FIXES AND SMALL CHANGES

Fix issues with deleting and moving media items in media Panel views.
Make out-of-range keyframes menu do write out correctly for all edit actions.
Fix slight GUI shaking in Keyframe Editor.
Make $HOME default folder for "Save As..." when no good last save data exists.
Drop 96 kHz audio sample rate option.
Fix rendered Fade out video position.
Fix rendered fades delete actions.
Fix rendered transitions Issue #836.
Make fade editors position update with timeline.
Titler: Fix layers load GUI inconsistency with layer visibility.
Escape G'Mic render paths spaces.
Make fade buttons default lengths configurable.
Player buttons tooltips fixes.
Fix double .xml in selection Container Clips.S
Autocreate user defined render folder if deleted.
Position Scale filter: Make keyframe copy paste work Position Scale filter: Make menu actions work Position Scale filter: Set initial value to 0,0 Position Scale filter: Fix numerical inputs
Add Default Keyboard Shortcuts list is Docs.
Fix missing proxy dir on launch.
Make NO_DECORATIONS default button style.
Remove test.py module, it is not used.
Drop presets from G'Mic tool rendering options.
Add action to render proxyfiles for all project media.
Make sure there is always space displayed in GUI after sequence end.
Make dark theme timeline marker yellow to pop better.
Position bar markesrs display bug fix.
Implement default render folder feature.
Replace deprecated time.clock() with time.monotonic.
Implement quieting output prints with commandline switch --quiet.
Fix Issue #801 with unexpected save behaviour with moved project files.
Try to use original media when proxy media missing on load and project is in proxy mode.
Make proxies destroyable with cache management UI.

Flowblade 2.4

Date: December 12, 2019

Flowblade 2.4 is the first version of the application running on Python 3.

We also got interesting contributions in this development cycle and made some quite large changes on how Compositing works.

With the Python 3 conversion now behind us, we have plenty of interesting ideas for the next development cycle and will also start working towards getting video display moved on from SDL 1.2.

PYTHON 3 PORT

All distributions are encouraged to update to Flowblade 2.4 and MLT 6.18

Flowblade was ported to Python 3. The process went without major gliches and we only needed to do one single patch upstream to maintain functionality.

The change however represents a discontinuity point in the development of the application, e.g. we do not offer .deb package for this release. It is also possible that we didn't catch all regressions, but we expect to get back on track towards continual quality improvement very quickly.

Going forward we hope that the Python project focuses on improving its existing strenghs in a backward compatible way. The decade long transition into Python 3 should be considered as proof that further compatibility breaking changes will only hurt all stakeholders in the platform.

ARDOUR EXPORT

Nathan Rosenquist contributed functionality to export Sequence audio as an Ardour project.

This contribution is an important step towards more professional workflows where audio is worked on a dedicated application after the image edit is completed.

Advantages of editing audio in Adrour include cutting audio with single sample accuracy (Flowblade generally allows cutting at every 44100th sample), unlimited tracks, more and better audio filtering options and much more.

NEW COMPOSITING MODE 'STANDARD AUTO'

Previously we had a Compositor Auto Follow mode that changed the way compositors behaved.

In this release we are moving to present that previous functionality as a Compositor Mode and also we added a new Compositor Mode Standard Auto Follow.

Standard Auto Follow mode is the most simple and easiest to use Compositing Mode.

In Standard Auto Follow mode Compositors follow their origin clips automatically and users can only add one compositor per clip. Compositors select their destination tracks automatically and it is not possible to create node tree compositions.

This mode works most similarly to way that compositing works in most other video editors.

User can set Compositing Mode for each Sequence by selecting it from Sequence -> Compositing Mode sub menu.

COMPOSITOR CHANGES

We made some changes here to improve image quality and approachability when working with compositors.

Dropped Dissolve and Picture-in-Picture from compositors selection, these use cases are better covered by Blend and Affine Blend that have more functionality and better quality when compositing with alpha channel.
Renamed Region to Wipe/Translate and moved it into new group Wipe with Wipe Clip Length Compositor.
Renamed Alpha Combiners compositor group Alpha and moved LumaToAlpha compositor in it.
Dropped Dodge blender and Cairo blending mode "Saturate" because these were not functioning properly.
Added 'Delete Compositors' menu action in clip context menu.

TRANSFORM FILTERS UPDATES

Filter selection was updated New available filters transform are Position Scale, Rotate and Shear.
Position Scale filter now has GUI editor.
All filter values can now be edited with keyframes.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Pascal de Bruijn

New defishor type filter and improved defaults - Changed Default new Project Profile to: HD 1080p 30 fps - Change mp2 audio encoder to libtwolame - Change H.264 video to use with AAC audio - drop mp3 codec audio bitrate to real available maximum - Change WebM to use xiph's libvorbis - make Ogg Theora video have Ogg Vorbis audio - Mention VP8 video for WebM container - Mention Ogg container for Theora video - Make h.264 as first option Encoding selection. - Proxy Editing:fix h.264 proxy format audio description (ref: dc13921e), reduce alignment to 2, this gets rid of the black bars , sensibly match audio codec to their (proxy) video codec - Flowblade CSS Theme: unset all properties so the system theme doesn't bleed through - keep assets sources local - GUI Keyframededitor colors update to better match Flowblade theme colors - Remove duplicates of profiles atsc_720p_25, atsc_720p_2997, atsc_720p_50, atsc_720p_5994

Steven van de Beek

Fixed big buttons for HiDPI screens with new cdoe and new icons provided
fixed autosave interval selection to work.

Nathan Rosenqvist

Fix atomic file for Python3 - update Lossless HuffYUV and Apple ProRes render Profiles to use 24bit audio - add numpy dependency to python3 doc.

cclauss IconSize.DND -> Gtk.IconSize.DND

Alex Myczko Rename flowblade..po to flowblade.po

TRANSLATIONS

Chinese zh_CN translation update by 驿窗

Czech translation update by Pavel Fric

Russian translation update for application and help docs Николай Смольянинов.

FEATURE ADDITIONS AND BUG FIXES

Fix sequence combining bugs
Add audio_match property to all shape filters to fix audio level bug
Fix audio monitoring for all sequences
Fix Issue #443 with media loading and bins
Add Wipe alpha filter
Change Paster Filters -> Paste Filters / Properties
Allow opening MLT XML files with exactly matching profiles
Make Proxy mode info available for Render Queue items
Drop LensCorrectionAV filter
Make possible to select the monitor used to decide window layout
Fix box move bug
Make possible to copy paste clip ranges with blanks in them
Project events are now displayed on modal window on all screen sizes
Fix Render panel GUI for 900px height screens
JKL playback new speed 1.8x, GUI fix
Geometry editors GUI update
Keyframe values can now be copy pasted
Created Sequence menu to simplify Edit and Project menus
Batch render window GUI touchup
Make possible to render a compound clip from non-active sequence
Media icons GUI update
Middlebar GUI update
Make monitor timecode infos pop better
Created document helpng to create MLT bindigs to run Flowblade

Flowblade 2.2

Date: August 26, 2019

Flowblade 2.2 is the first new version after 2.0 brought large changes the editing workflow and application layout. This time the main focus was on improving Flowblade's compositing capabilities with a dedicated tool for editing animated masks being most important new functionality.

There was also a lot of other new functionality and fixes, including G'Mic update, support for XDG user folders and many Issues fixed from Github Issue list.

Compositing Improvements

For the purpose of improving compositing we added 2 new filters and 1 new compositor. Together these will enable doing much more complex compositing work.

There is a tutorial video for the new compositioning features: https://vimeo.com/355860509.

RotoMask Filter

RotoMask filter enables creating animated line or curve masks which will either affect the alpha channel or RGB data. Masks are edited with a GUI editor created especially for this filter, editor also comes with complete keyframe editing functionality.

LumaToAlpha Compositor

This compositor uses luma values from source track and writes them into alpha channel of target track.

FileLumaToAlpha Filter

This filter uses luma values from source media and writes them into alpha channel of video or image clip.

User data moved into XDG folders

We have moved user data from directory /home/USERFOLDER/.flowblade into XDG folders specified in the user system. Data will be copied automatically on first launch of this version.

NOTE: Thumbnail and Render directories are not user settable anymore since we decided to support XDG user data spec.

NOTE: Application DOES NOT delete existing data in .flowblade folder, so if you have large amount of data there you will probably want to delete folder /home/USERFOLDER/.flowblade manually to free disk space.

New Filters

We added 3 new filters: Vignette Advanced, Normalize and Gradient Tint.

Keyframe Edit Tool update

Tool colors got an update.
All keyframable params can now be edited with the tool.
Value snapping options for steps 2 and 5 were added.

Tools updates

G'MIC

We added 20 new filters for systems G'MIC 2+: YAG Effect, Delaunay, Difference of Gaussians, Dices, Boost Chroma, Threshold, Etch, Bokeh, Make Squiggly, Dream Smooth, Graphic Novel, Rodilius, Aurora, Grid Hexagonal, Anguish, Blockism, Cut Out, Wiremap, Fraeky BW, Warhol, Grid Triangular
Gmic tool no longer does audio scrubbing
Some GUI fixes

Titler

Layout update
New layers now use current selected font properties

Contributions

Николай Смольянинов did a overhaul of wipe luma files with some new ones added and some existing improved.

rtomj fixed issue #660 caused by move to XDG folders.

Alex Myczko Updated INSTALLING.md with new information.

jorgenatz Change launch script for variant install locations

cclauss provided a batch of correctness fixes improving code base quality and helping towards Python 3 transition.

Going forward

The next thing in line is the Python 3 conversion.

Things are looking good on this front and hopefully there will be no major setbacks. We may do a release that does just the conversion or perhaps do a longer release cycle with some new features added too. In any case there will be at least one more release this year to move Flowblade to Python 3.

Translations updates

Czech translation update by Peter Frei
Italy translation update by Enrico Bella
Ukrainian translation update by Slava Manoilo
Russian translation update by Николай Смольянинов

New small features

Move fade buttons under Opacity slider in Compositors
Add keep existing workflow item to new version first run workflow menu
Removed Finnish translation
Add Alt+S as keyboard shortcut for Sync All Compositors
Make Control + Delete do Lift
Make timeline auto expand if possible when making track heights larger
Make Multitrim tool exit on empty click like other trims
Add pref to loop clips in monitor, #623
Make R do Overwrite Range and change Toggle Ripple to Alt + R
Make track scrubbing action selection persistent
Make Keyboard Shortcuts dialog non-modal
Make mouse double click on track head toggle track height
Show pulse progress bar when doing clapperless compare
Make ALT + N open next media item in monitor
Make , and . nudge selected clips on timeline
Audio media items icon update
Fix #529, more complete render settings saving
Fix tool shortcuts display in Keyboard Shortcuts dialog
Add append media from Bin to timeline feature, Issue #605
Make audio scrubbing user settable
Make Master Audio meter resizable
Make possible to render speedup video with 601-2900% speedup, Issue #648
Make possible to forca any language in any language OS
Added Operation combobox for two alpha filters
MLT profiles were updated

Bug fixes

Fix tracks resize to fit failure bug
Fix Issue #661 with no update on loaded filter data
Fix Issue #659 with bad UI for buttons in custom theme
Handle missing LADSPA filters in audio clip context menus
Fix add fade in case kfs exist after fade length
Update some MLT profiles
Fix extra blank appearing when adding new video tracks
Make recents list update for all saves
Keep source bin open when doing drag'n'drop to another bin
Fix reverted filter stack move menu items, #641
Fix no drag for keyframe on first press when initializing Keyframe Tool from pop-up menu
Fix value updates when going from Keyframe editor to slider
Add missing keyframe editor updates in clipeffectseditor.py
Fix cut tool playback bug
Fix compositor end drag snap frame
Fix Issue #640 with hite frames + static added to end of file when rendering fixed range
Fix Media Relinker and Keyboard shortcuts dialog (nää ei ollut dynaamiset)
Fix timeline track column repaint bug
Fix args rendering on small screens when args window never opened
Fix missing c_seq on load error
Fix colors for visibility in workflow dialog, Issue #622
Don't match profiles with more then 2x size difference to media even if fps matches, Issue #517
Fix keyframe delete not registering when done as last edit

Flowblade 2.0

Date: February 4, 2019

Flowblade 2.0 comes with the largest changes to workflow and UX since the very first releases.

Timeline editing workflow has been made much more configurable, new tools have been added and GUI comes with a new custom theme (for Gtk+ versions >= 3.22), new top row layout and modernized design language.

Workflow 2.0

The insert editing approach to video editing taken by previous versions of Flowblade has had the down side of being found by some users to be somewhat unintuitive. On the other hand many users have found it to be clean and efficient.

Flowblade 2.0 solves this issue by presenting a configurable workflow that enables users to make the application better confirm to their mental model of editing workflow.

Toolset Configuration

User can select between 1 - 9 tools to be available via tool menu and shortcut keys 1-9
User can set the order in which the tools presented and which shortcut keys they get.
The default tool is the first tool in the tool menu with shortcut key 1. This is the tool that is activated when for example exiting trims, this is settable by selecting the tool order

Configurable Timeline Behaviours

Drag'n'Drop behaviour, user can select whether insert or blank overwrites are done on track V1 and others
Composiors autofollow, users can make compositors follow their origin clips automatically

Workflow presets

To get things going the user is given option too choose between two Workflow Preset options application start or at anytime later.

STANDARD WORKFLOW has the Move tool as default tool and presents a workflow similar to most video editors. Tools: Move, Multitrim, Spacer, Insert, Cut, Keyframe Behaviours: Drag'n'Drop: 'Always Overwrite Blanks', Compositors Autofollow: Off

FILM STYLE WORKFLOW has the Insert tool as the default tool and employs insert style editing. This was the workflow in previous versions of the application. Tools: Insert, Move, Trim, Roll, Slip,Spacer, Box Behaviours: Drag'n'Drop: 'Overwrite blanks on non-V1 tracks', Compositors Autofollow: Off

New Tools

Four new tools have been added to selection of tools that user has available when deciding on their preferred toolset.

Keyframe tool enables editing Volume and Brightness keyframes on the timeline with overlay curves editor.
Multitrim tool combines Trim, Roll and Slip tool into a single tool that comminicates the available edit action with context sensitive cursor changes.
Cut Tool allow performing cuts with tool in addition to earlier method of cut action at playhead.
Ripple Trim tool was earlier available as a mode of Trim tool but it is now a separate tool.

Tools changes

Overwrite tool's name was changed to Move and it was made the default Tool in the "Standard" workflow preset. New Move tool also has box selection and box move available as additional edit actions if user does a box selection starting from pressing on empty spot on timeline.

GUI updates

We made quite a few updates and changes to the user interface to clean up and modernize the design.

New Custom Theme was created and made the default theme for the application. It has become clear that video editors are the kind of applications that work best with a custom made dark theme, the generic dark themes are too light for current established look of video editors. Now that GTK3 has finally stabilized the theme CSS, creating and maintaining a custom theme is now possible.

Earlier panel design with quite large buttons has been updated with a design employing more context and hamburger menus and by making almost all toplevel items icons.

For systems with larger screen dimension the default top row layout has been changed to a 3 panel design instead of the earlier 2 panel design, earlier layout still being available via user preference item.

Tooltips coverage was extended and almost all top level items now have individual tooltips..

Insert and Move (earlier Overwrite) tools have new cursors.

Keyframe editing updates

In addition to new Keyframe tool many updates were made to keyframe editing.

Slider to Keyframe editor functionality. Majority of filter parameters that earlier only had a slider editor available for setting a single unchanging value can now be eddited with a keyframe editor. There is a new keyframe icon in slider editors that turns slider editor into a keyframe editor when pressed. Kyrame editor can also be turned back into a slider editor.

Keyframe editors now have buttons that move keyframes 1 frame forward or backwards.

Keyframe editor out-of-clip-range keyframes now have info on on them displayed and there are editing actions available for deleting and setting their values.

Keyframe editors are also now updated on all mouse events making it more intuitive to know the value of a parameter in all keyframes.

Compositor geometry editors now have numerical inputs.

Shift + Arrow keys now change scale in Compositor geometry editors.

Compositors

Transform Compositor was added. This provides some transformations like rotations that previously were not available.
AlphaXOR, Alpha Out and Alpha In Compositors were added that provide additional ways of combining images using alpha channel data.

Edit Action updates

Ripple delete Button, that does multitrack ripple to maintain sync between tracks if overwrites can be avoided.

Shift + X cuts all tracks on Playhead.

Contributions

Sequence Split functionality. It is now possible to split Sequence at playhead position to create a new Sequence from timeline contents after playhead, by Bene81.

Fix GTK version detection logic inversion problem, Issue #521, by Bene81.

Reducing video track count damages project Issue #486, fixed by Eliot Blennerhassett.

Change tracks dialog now gets current sequence track counts, not hard coded values by Eliot Blennerhassett.

Some wipe luma files for wide screen do not work correctly, Issue #572, fixed by Николай Смольянинов who also provided very helpful release QA.

Make Flowblade exit cleanly if audio waveform rendering is still on, by Steven van de Beek.

Add appdata file used by e.g. GNOME Software or KDE Discover by Peter Eszlari.

Change icon path in setup.py to comply freedesktop with spec, fix mimetype data to be consistent, by Peter Eszlari.

Archlinux docs fix, depends sdl_image by Bernhard Landauer.

New translations

Steve Nian contributed Traditional Chinese translation. Slava Manoilo contributed Urkrainian translation.

Help docs in Russian

Николай Смольянинов created the first full translation of help documentation, docs are now available in Russian too. Andrey Grigoriev provided some additional scripts to display correct helps in all systems.

Translations updates

Czech translations updates by Pavel Fic and p-bo.

Russian translation update Николай Смольянинов.

Polish translation update by Stanisław Polak.

German translation update by Martin Gansser.

Refactoring

Some worst modules were cut in half and object naming was somewhat improved. Modes setting code was moved from module editevent.py - > modesetting.py. Screen editors code was renamed and moved from module keyframeeditor.py -> keyframeeditcanvas.py. Unused imports were removed using pyflakes analysis.

Future directions

This release took longer then would have been liked for various reasons, but mainly because the feature set was larger then usually and getting a release out of at least reasonable quality took some effort.

We will be doing 2 more releases this year with feature sets that will be adjusted to make sure that we have some nice incremental steps forward. There is an updated roadmap for larger development directions thought to be important right now and Issues list has quite a few items that need addressing.

Smaller fixes and features

Add prefeference to not move to clip start on keyframe edit init

Keep filter editors open on most edits #537

More height for Compositor geometry editors on larger screens.

Make clip editor next/prev buttons stay in edit range.

768px height and some other screen sizes fixes can now full screen properly.

fix track locking for multiple tools.

Fix recent files bug.

No more changing to default edit mode on media drop

Add follow tline range in playback option, Issue #503.

Offer preference to switch mouse horizontal scroll direction, #499.

Fix Issue #532 by removing lossless mpeg2 rendering.

Make G'Mic tool monitors bigger for bigger screens.

Fix "Blend" Compositor

Remove some less useful preferences.

Fix trim info dialog texts.

Fix Issue #558 with setting user lumas.

Make possible to start playback with Space after loading clip in monitor with double click.

Support Shift range selection in media panel.

Fix Issue #497 with timeline mouse events on load.

Make possible to move Bins up/down in GUI.

Make hard coded paths work with flatpack.

Add Keyframe Editor editor buttons tooltips.

Fix Keyframe Editor icon positions for Flowblade/arc theme.

Fix MLT version filters dropping.

Fix crash by banning Qt producers to keep using Gtk producers after Qt ones were made default in MLT.

Flowblade 1.16

Date: March 31, 2018

Flowblade 1.16 is the sixteenth release of Flowblade. This cycle we mostly had improvements, refinements and bug fixes building on existing features. A lot of time was spend on developing new video display code, but we didn't get any results there yet. Work on that front will continue, we have some issues that need to resolved eventually and the currently used technology is slowly on its way out.

Tool cursor timeline sensitivity

This is the biggest user visible change. Previously tool cursors didn't react in any way to the timeline contents, now they change appearance on appropriate positions to signal that some different edit actions are available.

With Insert tool and Overwrite tool the cursor now changes on clip and Compositor ends to indicate that the user can drag the ends to lengthen or shorten the clips or Compositors. On top of Compositors cursor changes to indicate that Compositor can be dragged to a new position.
Trim tool now changes appearance to indicate which end of clip will be trimmed if Mouse Left is pressed and held.
Box tool now changes when entering selected box to indicate that box contents can be dragged sideways.

This feature was so far avoided by design based on the fact that it requires quite precise mouse positioning to initiate desired edits and larger target areas are easier and quicker to hit.

However, it has become clear that users prefer context sensitive tool cursors, the main evidence being that almost every other edit program has them, so this was now added to Flowblade. This will probably help beginner users more easily to get going with Flowblade.

The feature in on by default, but can be disabled to return to previous behaviour.

Tool cursors GUI update

Tool cursors appearance got an update as part of the timeline sensitivity work. The biggest change was to Overwrite tool cursor, it is now otherwise the same as the Insert cursor, except that it is red.

Compositor auto follow

It is now possible to set Compositors to automatically to follow their origin clips as clips are moved or trimmed. It is possible to set individual clips to remain manually editable even if auto follow is set on. This feature can flexibly offer good sides of both clip embedded Compositors and free flowing Compositors.

This mode is off by default and needs to activated from track popup menu.

Re-rendering rendered transitions

Rendered transitions can now be re-rendered e.g. when the clips that were used to render the transition have had new filters added.

It is also possible to batch re-render all rendered transitions. This is useful e.g. after leaving proxy mode before doing final render as in proxymode rendered transitions are rendered from proxy clips, and therefore are of worse quality then rendered transitions created from original media.

Clip markers

Users can now add markers to clips, before markers could only be added to timeline positions.

Some notable updates

Luma Wipe can now be made to run in reverse directions, earlier it could only be made alpha inverted.

A 'Playback' panel was added to Preferences dialog keep item count per panel low enough for quick discovery.

G'MIC Effects tool now works with G'MIC version 2.

Timewarp producer is used if available to have sound on forward slow/fast motion clips.

Compositors and Effects can now save and load their parameter values.

Flatpak

Github user eszlari created a Flowblade 1.14 Flatpak which is already available on Flathub. Version 1.16 is coming there too in the coming weeks. We will post info on Google+ on that when it is done.

Contributions

atomicfile.py module was added by Nathan Rosenquist to make saving data more robust.

Николай Смольянинов provided a series of reports on missing translations strings, the coverage should now be close to 100%.

Future directions

The focus areas of next release will be animations, masks and compositing. So far the focus has squarly been on Flowblade as an editing tool, but now we will look for ways to expand application's feature set in this direction.

There are a number of approaches that can be tried here, and it is difficult beforehand to predict which will work out, so we will basically try everything and see how things turn out. The translations workflow update will definitely come too.

We will keep the 6 month release cycle, so next release will be sometime in the autumn.

Other bugfixes and improvements

Remove all prints with possible non-latin characters from save/load
Fix Issue #478, crash on small screens
Add info on rerendering proxies when in proxy mode telling user to change to original mode, issue #435
Show some info on alpha filters add to help users understand that they need to add compositor too
Make some missing blend modes available for translation, fix #461
Fix Issue #465, rendering frame sequences with PNG codec
Fix crash on media item double click, Issue #466
Fix small screen regression caused by new fade buttons, Issue #467
Fix Issue #436 with ruler marks in 23.98 and fractional framerates
Fix Issue #456 with batchrendering and unicode
Add audio sync error infos to translations
Fix #483, frames per image in image sequences
Fix audio muting bug #362
Make selected blanks stand out better
Make active keyframes stand out better
Remove all prints with possible non-latin characters from save/load to fix possible issues

Flowblade 1.14

Date: October 4, 2017

Flowblade 1.14 is the fifteenth release of Flowblade. This release had probably more new features then any release since the initial release 0.6. New functionality like sequence combining, compound clips and audio syncing take the application to the next level as a complete editing solution.

Especially sequence combining feature together with existing features like Range Log make Flowblade easily the most advanced and featureful FLOSS tool for projects with long complex edits and large amounts of media.

Improved user feedback has also made possible to refine many areas of functionality beoynd original design.

Audio Syncing

Python module clapperless.py by Martin Schitter and Benjamin M. Schwartz has made it possible to offer functionality that syncs media items based on their audio data. We have two new features offering Audio Syncing functionality.

Timeline Audio Syncing Now you can select two clips on timeline and request one of them to be moved so that clips' audio is synced on timeline. This makes it possible to do multicamera editing on timeline, one needs to manually set video mute on/off on tracks to see all tracks, but the workflow is possible now.
Audio Synced Compound Clips User can select a video and audio clip and create an audio synced compound clip media item from them. This is useful e.g. when audio is recorded separately and video clip only has some help audio.

Combining Sequences

It is possible to import full contents of another Sequence into the Sequence currently being edited. There are two ways provided to combine sequences:

Imported sequence can be appended at the end of current sequence.
Imported sequence can be spliced in at the playhead position.

This long overdue feature will make having multiple sequences per project a much more useful and flexible tool when building complex programs from smaller parts.

Compound Clips

A Compound Clip is a single clip created by combining multiple clips and compositors in to a single media item. Compound Clips are useful when some complex sequence is more conveniently handled as a single unit.

Compound Clip from Selection feature creates a Compound Clip from currently selected clips into a Compound Clip.
Compound Clip from Sequence feature creates a Compound Clip from current full contents of the timeline.
Audio Synced Compound Clip, see above.

Fade in/out

We have two new features addressing user requests for speeding up the process of creating fade in and fade out transitions.

Fade Compositors These are special new compositors that will automatically on creation place themselves at the beginning or end of clips and do not need any keyframe manipulation; lengths of fades are changed by changing the lengths of compositors.
Add Fade buttons Compositors panel now has Add Fade In and Add Fade Out buttons that will create keyframes that define a fade of desired length in a single click.

User Selectable Keyboard shortcuts

Steven van de Beek contributed code that makes it possible to have user defined keyboard shortcuts. In this release we offer a possibility to select between two predefined sets of shortcuts, and fully configurable keyboard shortcuts will be made available in the future.

Tools development

Reverse clips tool

We now offer a new tool to create reverse clips of user selectable speed from media items.

Titler

Titler got two new features:

Text drop shadow
Text outline

Disk cache management

Disk cache management window provides GUI tool for deleting saved hidden files that could eventually consume noticeable amounts of disk space.

Translations

We got a new new Cantonese translation by 老吴的BOX.

We got fully up to date translations for 1.14 in Russian, Polish and Czezh by Николай Смольянинов, Stanisław Polak and Pavel Fric respectively.

Future directions

During next cycle work continues roughly as outlined in road map and Issues list at Github.

Translations workflow update is definitely in the plans. The current workflow is difficult and outdated when there are several web solutions that are likely preferable to all translations contributors.

Next cycle will also see move to spending more development time on some upstream issues that can take a bit of time to come through as available features in the application, especially on installationss from distro repositories.

We will probably continue with the 6 month release cycle, but a shorter one is possible if certain planned improvements come together quickly enough.

Other new Features

Import media items from another project.
Support for manually entered time codes/frame values on clicked time code display in by Bene81.
Timeline edit move delta info overlay.
Save render settings for proxy conversions.
Add Lossless FFv1 profile by lsde.
Fix timelineline zoom issue causing problems with scrolling.
About menu visually improved by Mostafa Ahangarha.
Allow user preferences for Fast Forward / Reverse speeds by Steven van de Beek.
Allow shrinking timeline vertically when fewer than maximum tracks used tracks.
Make Range Overwrite 3 point edit work with only In set on Timeline.
Enable Volume filter to bring volume up > 100%

Feature Removals

Dropped Zoom Pan filter because it does not work on all files.

Other bugfixes and improvements

Double track heights for HiDPI screens.
Fix frame sequence render issue.
Fix wrong FPS on import for certain clips.
Fix Slip tool bug for clips with index 0.
Fix keyboard focus handling for 2 window layout.
Add guide lines for shift down edits in geometry editors.
Fix double click on blank crash.
Fix trim view handling for roll and slide with TRIM_VIEW_SINGLE.
Fix change profile unicode bug.
Get confirmation when rendering from proxy media.
Make default rate 8000kB for rendered transitions.
Get overwrite confirmation when rendering.
Disable cut action when it might interfere with ongoing edits.
Fix titler for 1.13 numpy.
Save mark in/out for proxy conversions.
Make keypad 1-7 change tools too.
Fix issue with Volume filter spin inputs.
Fix keyframe drag to last frame bug.
Fix not updating TC display after layout change.
Fix unicode marker names.
Add Clip Edit menu.
Reverse order of SCOPE_MIX_VALUES.
Add Window mode menu item.
Fix duplicate profiles.

Flowblade 1.12

Date: March 18, 2017

Flowblade 1.12 is the fourteenth release of Flowblade.

In this cycle the main developments were the adding of new tools for the first time since 0.14, and the increased level contributions the project received.

Much time was spend on creating an AppImage for the project but unfortunately no satisfactory end result was reached, so there will not be an AppImage with latest dependencies available for Flowblade yet.

Even with this and some redesign related delays we were able to advance the project at a reasonably pace.

Box tool

New Box tool is provided to help with the use case of moving a range containing media on multiple tracks to another point in the sequence. This has previously required multiple edit steps to achieve. The Box tool will reduce the number of required edit actions.

The main intended use case is probably best explained with a video: https://vimeo.com/207310517

Trim tool Ripple mode

Every use of Trim tool will cause the edited track to lose sync with other tracks after the trim point. The Ripple mode enables in most cases doing trims while maintaining sync with other tracks. Some points on Trim Ripple mode:

Sync is maintained by changing the lengths of the closest blanks on other tracks. This might not produce the edit you wish to achieve, in that case you will need to use Trim tool in default mode and do the edit in multiple steps.
No overwrites are allowed to happen so the available trim length is constrained by blank lengths on other tracks.
This tool is not provided as a separate tool and it is not given a GUI top level representation because it became clear that the resulting multitrack edit can be found confusing by many users
The tool can be accessed by toggling the Trim tool mode using 'R' key when timeline has keyboard focus.

Contributions

We added a new category 'Developers' in the About dialog for contributors producing multiple patches and taking part in development discussions. The first developers that were added to this category were Steven van de Beek and Nathan Rosenquist.

Steven van de Beek

Fix loading of projects with unicode names.
Fix "Size/height" for multiple filters in "Transform" group
Fix Render Folder from Preferences not being copied to Render panel
Change .xml file to associate Flowblade logo to .flb files.
Optionally Show Full Filenames in Media items
Render with multiple threads and allow drop frames in playback.

Nathan Rosenquist

Add option to hide file extensions during import for cleaner media names
Round FPS to whole numbers for NTSC time code to get NTSC timocode correct
Fix updating bin file count after deleting files
Make 'End' key and move playhead to the end of sequence.
Explain video gamma problem on certain systems.

AVFilters

MLT 6.2.0 added AVFilters support. Flowblade now offers additional filters if you have MLT > 6.2.0 with AVFilters module installed.

Lut3D This makes possible to add similar film emulation filters that are available in G'Mic by using .cube files.
Zoom/Pan Similar functionality current "Affine" filter but the performance is much better
Color Channels Mixer This makes possible to use color data of one channel to determine color output of another channel. Basic example would be making green shirt blue by using green color data to display blue color.
Perspective Stretch image in way that can enable changing perspective.
Lens correction AV Filter that corrects typical lens errors.

Translations

We got a new Russian translation by Nikolai Smoljaninov. There are over 100 million Russian spekers in the world and most use localised applications, so this widens the potential user base in a big way.

Hungarian and German translations got updates by Péter Gábor and Mario Dejanovic.

Future directions

Move to 2 releases per year instead of 3. The release overhead and associated project slowdown has been getting bigger lately and with container formats possibly added to release requirements it is better to make the development cycles a bit longer to get overall better development throughput.

Container formats and Wayland support These technologies are still being developed and adopted. Solutions here are worked on will be made available when ready.

Focus areas for next cycle include continued work on Issue list and Roadmap, Clip Compositors that automatically follow clips even across tracks will be attempted, tool integration hopefully gets a bit of attention, small website update and more tutorial videos will be done.

Other bugfixes and improvements

Fix extraraeditors.py translation problems (Péter Gábor)
Add missing params for translations (Péter Gábor)
Fix trim view for blank match frames
Set insert tool active after project load
Make marker graphic a bit more visible in dark theme
Make Trin and Roll edits snap
Make Spacer tool snap
Add higher bitrates for h264 and Theora codes for 4K encoding
Add 4K profiles for projects and rendering
Makes tracks number selection free with max. 9 tracks available
Add center playhead on arrow move preference
Make Control key keep aspect ratio when scaling with Affine Blend GUI editor
Fix adding graphics default length in and out to Image Sequences media
Add Compositor values copy-paste feature
Make Control key move image 10px for every arrow key press in Geometry editors
Make Mouse scroll zoom/scroll by selecting a preference.

Flowblade 1.10

Date: December 13, 2016

Flowblade 1.10 is the thirteenth release of Flowblade.

This cycle was a nice change in the sense that not much time was needed on project structural issues such as porting to GTK3 or creating a website.

The main feature in this release is the new Trim View, with the additional features being focused on editing and some GUI updates.

Next release cycle will focus on improved tool integration with the goal of providing more convenient and efficient ways to manipulate and create media within Flowblade in concert with other existing FLOSS tools. Some new editing tools and options will also be worked on, as well as bug fixes and feature requests in the Issues list.

Appimage for this will release will become available in January and for all subsequent releases it will be available at release date.

Trim View

Trim View is feature available in most commercial packages and now also in Flowblade, probably as the first FLOSS video editor. It is maybe best described just by a screenshot.. The advantages are clear: user is provided with more information when doing a trim and is thus able to better assess the correct cut frame within a single edit action.

Points on Trim View performance

for "Trim" tool the trim tool should mostly work quite well
for "Roll" and "Slip" tools there is no getting around the fact that two video streams need to be displayed in real time. The following performance considerations apply:
- SSDs perform better the spinning hard disks
- faster processors improve playback
- video streams like image sequences consisting fully of I-frames perform better than streams with a lot of B- and P-frames

For these reasons the Trim View is off by default and needs to activated from menu below the monitor. Users are advised to assess for themselves if performance is satisfactory for system and media they are working on

Frame Matching

Trim view layout also addresses a fundamental restriction of a single monitor layout: user is unable to compare video material to other material when deciding on a clip to add to a sequence. We now provide two mechanisms to help with this use case:

monitor frame matching, shown here.
timeline frame matching, shown here.

Editing Improvements

a "Delete Range" button is now provided to cut and lift material inside selected range on all tracks
Filters in filter stack can now be rearranged
Spacer tool got some bug fixes improving its usabily
User can now select all clips before or after a clip on timeline using a popup menu option.

xport from timeline to tools

timeline clips can be now exported with frame range preserved to G'MIX Effects Tool, Slow/Fast Motion renderer and Natron if it is installed in the system.

Dual monitor and small screens improvements

dual monitor support has been improved by providing a to window layout shown here.
small screen sizes support has been updated with multiple bug fixes and feature additions.

GUI updates

Monitor area layout was updated with the main goal of providing clearer visual cues whether Timeline or Clip is displayed in the monitor by making the selection buttons much bigger.
Middlebar got some minor visual updates

German translation update

German translation received an update from Mario Dejanovic.

Other bugfixes and improvements

Make render args available for small screen heights
Make Master Audio Meter available for small screen heights
Fix displayed media lengths for old and changed profile projects
Ask for exit confirmation when opening non-empty projects from recents list
Add 7/2 and 2/7 track configurations whencreating new projects
Trim init optimization
Fix adding watermark dialog freeze
Show file name in media item tooltip
Add track active set actions to all tracks menu
Make Media Relinker remember last folder
Make Media Icons display length at bottom and range at top
Remember fade/transition lengths between dialog invocations
Make holding down Shift key snap to X or Y in compositor editors
Update track lock icon
Menu actions to turn all filters in timeline on/off
Make Home key move to timeline start

Flowblade 1.8

Date: September 19, 2016

Flowblade 1.8 is the twelfth release of Flowblade.

During this cycle a lot of time was spend on creating a website for the project and on bringing a node compositor tool to Flowblade. Website was successfully deployed, but the node compositor tool was dropped in final stages of development.

The node compositor was dropped when I realized that it does not serve any user group particularly well.

Casual users will find difficult to use node compositors effectively as any non-trivial composition requires creating complex node graphs. On the other hand adcanced users already have alternative FLOSS solutions like Natron and Blender available, and are unlikely to adopt this tool in meaningful numbers.

Once it became clear that it would require postponing this release quite a bit to do the remaining bugfixing and creating documentation, I decided that the project is best served by allocating resources to other areas of development.

We did get some good stuff in, and with the next cycle we can hopefully get moving with improved speed of feature development.

Particular attention will given to the current Issues list, with some of the other focus areas being improving integration between tools and timeline, and an attempt to make nested clips available.

Flowblade Main Features

Keyboard trimming with arrow keys Trim positions can now be moved using arrow keys and trim edit confirmed with pressing Enter key. This is often more convenient and precise then always working with a mouse
Clip Snapping Clips and compositors will now snap to clip ends on adjacent tracks when clips or compositors are moved or their ends dragged.
Clips display media thumbnails This helps differentiating clips from each other on timeline.
EDL export is now available. Thanks to Github user tin2tin for extensive testing on software not available on my system. Unfortunately it became clear that Blender EDL import is buggy.

G'MIC Film Emulation Filters

G'MIC Effects tool got an important capability update with the addition of film emulation filters.

G'MIC Film Emulation Filters change the tones and gamma of the image to resemble different film stocks. Where as other color correction filters available in Flowblade work with luma or R,G,B LUTs, film emulation filters employ much bigger LUTs which are applied to the 3D color space of the image, and can achieve more detailed changes.

The results have been quite nice during testing; it is often possible to achieve subtle effects that greatly improve the look of the material.

Contributions

In this cycle we got the largest amount of contributions per cycle so far.

Hungarian translation was provided by Péter Gábor. These take a big amount work and we're always happy to receive a new one.
Play/pause toggle with single button functionality was provided by Github user dvdlvr. This has been asked before so a portion of users probably likes it better like. The new behaviour needs to be activated from Preferences
Titler remembers last save directory patch by Martin Mois. Before the user needed to always navigate away from the default folder when saving titles.
New anti-aliased the monitor control icons and modified the clear marks icon by Github user bergamote improve visuals on that part of the GUI.

Bugfixes and enhancements

"Change Project" functionality fixed, and works much better now
If first loaded media does not match current project profile, user is informed and given option to switch to matching profile.
Fix assoc file launch from e.g. Nautilus
Improve missing rendered transition media overlap info
Compositors can now move by dragging from middle too, not just edges
Do gi.require() for Gtk and PangoCairo to silence warnings and specify Gtk+ 3
Make MLT version detection work for two digit version number parts
Fix adding media while in proxy mode
Check and give info on IO errors when saving in main app and relinker
Add keyboard shortcut 'R' for resyncing selected clip or compositor
Display image sizes for graphics files in info dialogs
Make CTRL + Mouse toggle media items selection state, not just add to selection
Make KeyFrameEditor prev button update keuframes info
Fix updating non-existing clip in effects editor after delete
Make Compositor GUI edit update keyframe count display
Add user selectable scope overlay opacity
Add timeline start indicator triangles
Remove non-existing files from recents list
Fix launching uninited renders
Fix too long filename layout bug in filter editor
Fix unicode project name bug
Display warning icons for non-profile-matching video media
Reset titler for new project

Flowblade 1.6

Date: March 2, 2016

Flowblade 1.6 is the eleventh release of Flowblade. The main feature of this release is the new G'MIC Effects tool.

G'MIC effects tool

G'MIC is a full-featured open-source framework for image processing developed by french research scientist David Tschumperlé and others. Its main strength is that it enables creating complex new image filters without writing any compiled code.

For applications such as Flowblade this makes it possible to offer a wide range of image filtering capabilities using a relatively small amount of managed code.

A demo video of some features available in the first release is available at Vimeo. This is just the first step, many more filters will come in the future.

Other main features in this release

Changing project profile is now possible. This is a feature that was requested by users who felt uneasy about having to commit to a profile at the beginning of the project.
Drag'n'drop of media files from other applications is a standard feature that has so far been missing from Flowblade.
Middlebar was updated on wider screens as G'MIC, Batch Render Queue and Split Audio buttons were added.
'Sync All Compositors' functionality was added This can be very useful in situations where a track as a whole is moved in relation to other media.

For the next release cycle the focus will be on integrating existing technologies to improve Flowblade's capabilities in doing motion graphics. The Natron compositor project offers a lot of promise here, and the existing node compositor by myself will be made available in some form.

Also a project website will be developed during this cycle. The first version is to be made available in a week or two.

The next cycle will be the longest since 0.16 because of the amount of coding and research needed. The target release date for 1.8 is September 2016.

Bugfixes and enhancements

Fix set parent clip functionality
Fix translation scripts (apienk)
Re-create all media icons always when requested
Fix dark theme monitor indicator icon
Fix change to first bin after media load bug
Remove alpha mode functionality from compositors
Fix batch render to respect profile selection
Fix single render to respect changed profile
Open missing asset project directly from info dialog into Media Relinker on request
Add Mark In and Mark Out data to clip info dialog
Remove write env data functionality
Fix dark theme mute video icon
Add transition button to TC Middle layout and combine it with edit buttons group
Fix filter cloning for filters with non-mlt properties
Make Titler work better with non-square pixel formats
Add HD 1080p 60fps profile
Range Log sorting upgrade and gmic encode view update
New undo-redo icons (bergamote)
Render slowmo files from original when using proxy files
Make possible to render slowmo file from a Range Log item
RHEL7/CentOS compatibility patch (Martin A. Wielebinski)
Fix file info fps display
Make relinker and batchrender use dark theme
Make single render use dark theme and add percentage display
New in/out markers (bergamote)

Flowblade 1.4

Date: November 24, 2015

Flowblade 1.4 is the tenth release of Flowblade and the first release after the GTK3 port.

Most main features in this release are changes to editing model that were designed to make editing more approachable and quicker. It is also notable that a large part of the main features were based on user requests, a first for the project.

In the next release cycle features that will be attempted include a G'MIC effects scripting tool, a node compositor tool using an existing code base, a first launch tips window for new users, and a clip snapping feature.

In 2016 there will probably be 3-4 releases, and the next release 1.6 is targeted for March. There will be some reports on progress in the Flowblade Google+ group.

Main Features in this release

Fade/Transition cover delete feature was added. Selecting a single rendered fade/transition clip and pressing delete will cause the deleted area to be covered using material from adjacent clips if such material is available. This makes working with single track transitions/fades faster. Previous behaviour can be restored using a preference option.
Clip ends drag with Control + Right mouse. When a move tool - Insert, Overwrite or Spacer - is selected clip's ends can now be dragged to change clip's length. This is useful when for example a clip in a multitrack composition needs to be made longer to cover a clip on a track below. Clips end drags perform overwrite on empty/blank regions and insert on media regions of timeline.
Drag'n'drop overwrite action on non-V1 tracks has been added. Dropping clip on track V1 works like before, but on non-V1 tracks:
- clip will be inserted if dropped on a clip
- clip will overwrite available blank and empty space and will perform insert for the length of media frames that would be overwritten.
This makes creating multitrack compositions faster. Previous drag'n'drop behaviour can be restored using a preference option.
Always on audio levels display functionality was added. Before the audio levels could only be displayed on request, but now it possible to have audio levels rendered on background and displayed as soon as they are available
Filters can now be copy/pasted from one clip to another. It has been possible to copy paste clips on timeline for quite a while, but now this feature was made more discovarable by adding menu items for the functionality.

Other features and enhancements

Fix media relinking for projects with SAVEFILE_VERSION < 4
Add 1080p 50fps profile
Fix keys 1-6 stopping working after tool selection
Fix snapshot save same basename bug
Add fullscreen view
Begin work on add xdg-app support
Fix color clips backwards compatibility for some old projects
Add info text active keyframe and number of keyframes to keyframe editors
Make 'Control + Left/Right arrow' move 10 frames at a time
Add 'Clear Filters' item to clip pop-up menu
Make effects editor keyframe editors listen for space key play/stop
Fix crashing keyframe editor for multitrack moves
Make compositor editors zoom with mouse scroll
Make Space for play/stop work then focus on keyframe editor
Make Affine Blend editable with arrows keys
Make keyframeeditor.RotatingGeometryEditor receive keyframe updates

Flowblade 1.2

Date: September 9, 2015

Flowblade 1.2 is the ninth release of Flowblade.

Flowblade has now been ported to GTK3.

The process was not as straight forward as one might think but eventually everything worked out. There always seemed to be just one more little change in API that required all instances to be fixed by hand. Luckily there was a conversion script available that did most of the grunt work to get things going.
We did get something in return. A small but percipteble responsiveness improvement was gained probably because GTK3 provides a Cairo widget for creating custom widgets that is now used instead of the project specific Cairo widget that was used before. GTK3 also seems to render widgets a bit crispier.
I really hope that major API breaking version jumps for widget toolkits are avoided as much as possible. Projects with large interface and small man power can really suffer here.

There were some other major developments during the cycle too:

All rendering was moved out of process as the in-process rendering was found to not work correctly in some cases.
Dark theme support was improved. It is now possible to use a dark theme just by setting a preference if the GTK3 theme used has a dark variant available.
Small screen support has been upgraded. The application now works better on 768px height screens.

There has also been more contributors then ever, so the move to Github seems to have a positive effect on the project visibility and participation.

After bug fix release 1.0 and GTK3 port release 1.2, the next cycle will be about getting back on track with steady improvement in features and stabilization.

The 1.4 will also be the first "real" release of the 1.x series. In the 1.x series all changes to project format, editing paradigm and fundamental technical structure are avoided in favor of creating a solid application that reaches its full potential within the chosen tech/design path. The 1.x series will probably last for about two years, after which further fundamental change will be considered.

Other bug fixes and enhancements

Add preference to always use English on a localized OS
Make audio sample rate user selectable for rendering
Drop support for creating new 'Affine' compositors. 'Affine' didn't work properly.
Make color clips use hidden pngs instead of mlt producer to fix compositing crashes.
Fix MPEG - 4 / .mp4 rendering to always respect source image shape
Fix transform filters by removing non-persitant scaling properties
Fix clip audio sample frequency and channels info display
Use translations at /usr/share/locale if available
Fix preset encodings batch rendering
Make image sequence open dialog use the last opened media directory
Make out-of-process tools write log files

Flowblade 1.0

Date: June 15, 2015

Flowblade 1.0 is the eighth release of Flowblade. It turns out that you can write a video editor with those Python bindings to MLT.

This release focused almost entirely on bugfixes to ensure maximum quality of existing features for 1.0 release. This was probably a good decision as quite a few bugs were found and fixed.

Quite a bit of time was spend moving the project from Google Code project hosting to Github. After a short time here it's quite clear that Github is a superior platform, so it was all for the better.

Next release cycle will be devoted to the GTK3 port. Hopefully everything goes according to plan, and we can get back to adding new exiting features to the application.

Bug fixes and enhancements

Make range item delete work logically
Fix Range log group functionality
Media files pop-ups only display usable items for media type
Fix Media Relinker to work with image sequences correctly
Make backup snapshot have .flb ext no matter what user enters
Fix snapshot saving for image sequences
Add missing image sequence proxy render functionality
Fix snapshot relative paths lookup for image sequences
Update project event time display text
New fallback thumbnail icon
Fix MLT version comparison
Brightness Keyframed bug fixed
Moved help files from Google Code to HTML resource files
Remove panel frame shadows for cleaner look

Flowblade 0.18

Date: March 19, 2015

Flowblade 0.18 is the seventh release of Flowblade and the last one before 1.0.

Features in this release concentrated on media management, as that was thought to be the last under developed area that needed to be addressed before 1.0.

This cycle was a bit difficult as considerable work was done on features that were then abandoned because satisfactory functionality could not be achieved at this time. Also, the features that were released went through a redesign forcing a full code rewrite and the quick and easy release cycle turned into major undertaking.

Through all this it became clear that the time for Gtk3 port is now. Next release will be 1.0 and only bug fixes and some minor editing work flow features will be added. 1.0 will also be the last Gtk2 release of Flowblade.

Main Features in this release

Relative paths for media assets are now supported. If media file is not found using the saved absolute path, a file with same name is searched from subfolders relative to project file directory.
Save backup Snapshot functionality saves project file and all media used by project in selected folder for convenient backup.
Media Relinker tool makes replacing missing media files easy.
Image Sequence Rendering for exporting project as a file sequence is now available.

Other features and enhancements

Current Frame export
Fix Batch render track mute bug
Color Pulse and Ising pattern producers added
Fix Titler closing and saving bugs
Color Lift Gain Gamma filter added

Flowblade 0.16

Date: December 2, 2014

Flowblade 0.16 is the sixth release of Flowblade.

This release has only one major new feature, and marks a change in the approach until the 1.0 release is done.

The next 2-3 releases will contain at most 1 new major feature along with smaller enhancements and bug fixes. The releases will also come quicker, once every 3-4 months.

The previous release completed the editing concept and feature list needed for 1.0. The 1.0 release will be made before the end of 2015, after which the focus will shift immediately to the porting of the application to gtk3.

The code base refactoring has come to a conclusion with this release, and the focus when improving code readability will now shift to adding and improving comments.

Main Features in this release

Audio Master Meter has been added to top level GUI to help working with audio.
New Chroma Key filter works better on blue and green screen keying than the existing Color Select filter
Luma Key enables keying based on image luma values
Batch Rendering was changed to use dbus instead of PID files and should now actually work

Other features and enhancements

Add German translation
Add Italian translation
Fix Quick Enter and Quick Exit trim white blank display bug
Final round of refactoring before 1.0
Fix start-up problem from missing threads_enter() - Louis C. Villa
Require pygtk 2.0 to fix start-up on some systems - Louis C. Villa
Update timeline tools overlay GUI
Make Clip Monitor remember displayed frame
Fix flashing black around monitor bug
Add keyboard shortcuts ALT + I and ALT + O to move to in and out points
View selector for media panel to display all or only certain types of files
Add info on duplicate media items on load
Refactor and fix audio monitoring display update and exit

Flowblade 0.14

Date: June 18, 2014

Flowblade 0.14 is the fifth release of Flowblade.

This release has some good new features and improvements, see below for more info. It also seems clear that the "release every 6 months" schedule suits the project well at this stage, and it will be kept for the future.

In the next release cycle attention will be paid to rendering output files and media and project management.

New features for the next release have not been decided on yet, but MLT webFX module will be looked at, and there are some other services available that are not yet utilized by Flowblade.

Main Features in this release

Color Correction improvements in this release take a major step forward.
- New 3 band color correcting filter Color Grading makes professional level color manipulation possible on Flowblade
- Industry standard Catmull-Rom based Curves filter (other FLOSS video editors use Bezier based implementations, which in my opinion are inferior)
- RGB Adjustment filter is equipped with a new and much more intuitive editor and renamed as Color Adjustment.

Unfortunately the first two require repository version of MLT (=>0.9.1) which is not available on any distributions yet (Arch may have it).

Spacer tool makes it possible to move all timeline items on all the tracks as a single unit. If Control button is pressed all items on a single track can be moved. This makes it much quicker to restore relative positions of clips after edits that change positions between clips on different tracks.
Audio levels displayed on clips are now rendered much quicker and some earlier bugs were fixed.
Range Log functionality has been upgraded.
- Range Log items can now be dragged onto Timeline
- Timeline Clips can dragged to create Range Log items
- Range Log items can be arranged into groups
- ...and some other minor improvements and bug fixes
Quick Enter and Quick Exit for trim tools make editing more fluid. When using Trim, Roll and Slip -tools the edit now begins immediately on click. The old behaviour can be restored by setting a preference.

Other features and enhancements

Give info on a too long Fade for Clip
Improve Transition handles and error info.
Automatically create hidden folder for rendered clips
Automatically create hidden folder for thumbnails
Spanish translation
Make possible use wipe luma files from file system
Display media items as they are loaded
Add all filters on/off button
Add preference that sets last render directory as default on project open
Add warning if Render Profile fps different from Project Profile fps
Make track mute icons clickable for video/audio muting
Enable dragging clip from monitor to Timeline
CTRL + A support for media panel
Make mouse middle click zoom to sequence length on Timeline
Make Monitor playback interpolation user selectable
Fix hidden blank after sequence end bug
Fix render bug when minimizing windows
Fix Audio Mixer crash on exit
Fix 0.8 Project files forwards compatibility
Fix Titler crash on exit
Fix Filters editor delete out of index bug
Fix Quick Transition alignment bug
Fix Quick Transition undo bug
Fix window panels resize bug
Fix clip effects editor drag'n'drop bug
GUI updates: Render time value display before estimated time - speaker icon change sensitivity state - clip rects back into trim overlays - trim overlays GUI update - Image Sequence indicator - Graphics indicator - Render Proxy File menu item - selected compositor color to blue - Timeline overlay update - rendered clip length display in slo-mo dialog - vcodec and acodec info in clip info - audio icon update - artistic filter icon update

Flowblade 0.12

Date: January 14, 2014

Flowblade 0.12 is the fourth release of Flowblade.

This release was about gradual improvements on features, correctness and stability. The new features in this release may not be useful to all users, but are very much needed by small subsets of users, and make the application useful for wider variety of editing needs.

The continued refactoring and improving of the code base has made it more clear that no major rewrites are needed, and Flowblade can be developed in a gradual and predictable way in the future.

In this release

Slip tool allows changing the media displayed in a clip in a single edit action without changing the position and length of the clip
Proxy editing workflow can be used to edit material that makes the editing experience unacceptably unresponsive because the material places too high demands on the system
Batch rendering application makes it possible to render multiple programs in the background
Dark Theme support optimizes icons and GUI colours for dark themes
Copy Pasting clips on the timeline is now possible

Other features and enhancements

Watermarks
Rendering stopping bugs fixed, incl Motion Clip render bug
French and Czech translations
Playback frame positioning bug fixed
Icons and Tool cursors update
Simplify Tool names
Fix .mp4 files rendering bug
Fix wrong FPS value in File properties window
Change Theora render file extension to .ogv
Fix Image Sequence import bug on some numbering styles
Remove gnomevfs dependency
Add indicator to timeline clip being edited in effects editor
Make all thread GUI updates acquire gtk lock
Fix SpinButtons value display bug
Make Titler layer visibility togglable
Make possible to turn off safe and overlay displays in Titler
Make Titler window resizable
Add entry box to give file extension when rendering with args
Improve SVG handling
Fix saving bug caused by MLT types SWIG names
Fix Redo keyboard shortcut bug
Fix Range Log comment editing bug

Flowblade 0.10

Date: September 13, 2013

Flowblade 0.10 is the third release of Flowblade.

This release has a lot of new features and enhancements. The development cycle was longer than the planned 6 months, mainly because of the summer break and a cascade of interconnected changes that all needed to be completed before doing a release.

In future we will hold strictly to a maximum 6 months between releases, and will opt to postpone features in favour of a more reliable release schedule.

In this release

Tools metaphor is used for editing instead of Edit Modes like before
Audio Mixer window with VU meter + gain and pan controls for all tracks and master out (Requires MLT 0.8.8)
Affine Blend compositor provides single point of control to create keyframed composites with both opacity and affine transform and all the standard blend modes (Requires Frei0r 1.4, which isn't widely in repos)
Image sequences of numbered frames can be imported now as media
Preset rendering options for commonly used file types are made available to the user
Range Log panel enables user to save and name Mark In/Out ranges on media files. This is very useful when working with long files that have many areas of interest.
Marks can now be placed to identify positions on the timeline.
Single track rendered transitions for quick dissolves and wipes
Auto consolidate blanks, no more multiple blanks between clips after some edits
GUI Look'n'Feel was updated with over 20 new icons and new custom buttons

Other features and enhancements

Updated application menu
Configurable Tabs position
Configurable Timecode display position
Keyboard shortcuts list window
"Centring" action for Compositor editors
TAB key switches between Timeline/Clip display on monitor
Keyboard shortcut CTRL+L for logging clip ranges
Arrow keys move source image in Compositor editors
Project events panel and persistent project events data
8 video/1 audio and 1 video/8 audio track layoutsn for sequences
Media objects are now displayed using large thumbnails with information overlays
Noise and EBUBars image producers
Bin panel is now resizable
Colgate white balance plugin
Tracks menu
Support for Copy/Paste in Title Editor
Runtime environment data can be saved into a file
Rename and Clip Color features added to Clip context menus
Make cut action available when working with trim edit tools
Image Grid filter
Audio information for clip is displayed with level data instead of waveform
Panel sizes are now persistent
UP/DOWN arrows move position to In/Out Marks and clip ends on Clip Monitor display
HOME/END keys move position to timeline start/end
Sync Parent feature GUI update
Timeline focus fixes to make keyboard shortcuts available better
M keyboard shortcut for adding markers
Sync frame offsets visible
Display selected range on timeline frame widget
Display selected range length for Clips under monitor

Flowblade 0.8

Date: December 4, 2012

Flowblade 0.8 is the second release of Flowblade, and the first one to take advantage of bug reports and feature requests from users.

Although a few important new features were added, much of the effort after 0.6 was spend creating new Frei0r plugins, total of 14 were contributed by the author, 10 of which are available in Flowblade 0.8. Good new Fre0r plugins were contributed by other people too, so it may be worth while to install Frei0r from source code. See wiki: InstallingFrei0rPluginsFromSource.

New Features

Titler
Slow/Fast motion clips
Flowblade now runs on screens with height of 768 pixels
Creating Sequences with different number of tracks is now possible
Ability to change Track count of Sequence
T, Y and U keyboard shortcuts for insert events
J, K, L keyboard playback control
Default length of Drag'N'Drop for graphics is configurable
18 new filters added (latest Frei0r needed)
Environment information is made available to users

Major Bugfixes

Localisation bug causing non-working compositors fixed
Environment detection method changed to direct MLT for better results

Flowblade 0.6

Date: May 7, 2012

Initial release.

Features

Film style insert/trim editing paradigm
2 move modes and 2 trim modes
Image compositing with transformations, blend modes and pattern wipes
Close to 100 image and audio filters
Supports most common video and audio formats
JPEG, PNG, BMP, TGA, TIFF, GIF images and SVG vector graphics
Output encoding to multiple formats

Files

RELEASE_NOTES.md

Latest commit

History

RELEASE_NOTES.md

File metadata and controls

Release Notes

FLOWBLADE 2.14.0.2

FLOWBLADE 2.14.0.1

FLOWBLADE 2.14

USB JOG/SHUTTLE SUPPORT

EDITABLE TITLE CLIPS

OTHER NEW FEATURES

FILTERS UPDATES

OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS

GTK4 WORK

SMALL FEATURES AND BUG FIXES

Flowblade 2.12.0.2

FLOWBLADE 2.12

DATA STORES

MAXIMUM NUMBER OF TRACKS INCREASED TO 21

FASTER PROXY RENDERING

TOOLS AND CONFIGURATION REMOVAL

OTHER NEW FEATURES

CONTRIBUTIONS

WORK ON GTK 4 PORT

Small features, changes, removals and bugfixes

Flowblade 2.10.0.4

Flowblade 2.10.0.3

Flowblade 2.10.0.2

Flowblade 2.10.0.1

FLOWBLADE 2.10

FULL TRACK COMPOSITING IS THE NEW DEFAULT

GENERATORS

FLUXITY PLUGIN API

NEW KEYFRAME INTERPOLATION MODES

GPU RENDERING

NEW DEFAULT THEME

CONTRIBUTIONS

GUI UPDATES

Other new features

UX Papercuts

Removed features

Small features, changes and updates

BUG FIXES

FLOWBLADE 2.8

CONFIGURABLE PANEL POSITIONING

NEW THEMES

FREEBAR

CONFIGURABLE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

TOOLDOCK

FILTER EDIT PANEL UPDATE

NEW FILTER SELECT PANEL

COLOR ICONS

OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS

NEW FRENCH USER MANUAL

TRANSLATIONS UPDATES

OTHER CHANGES

NEXT CYCLE PLANS

BUG FIXES AND OTHER CHANGES

Flowblade 2.6.3

Flowblade 2.6.1

Flowblade 2.6

TECHNICAL ISSUES

COMPOSITING CHANGES

Standard Full Track Compositing Mode - no Compositors needed

Other Composing Mode changes

Making Standard Full Track the default Compositing Mode in the future

CONTAINER CLIPS

Compound Clips are now Selection Container Clips

TIMELINE RENDERING

JOBS PANEL

CONTRIBUTIONS

OTHER NEW FEATURES

FOCUS AREAS FOR NEXT DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

BUG FIXES AND SMALL CHANGES

Flowblade 2.4

PYTHON 3 PORT

ARDOUR EXPORT

NEW COMPOSITING MODE 'STANDARD AUTO'