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Table of Contents
Open Movie Maker
What is Open Movie Maker
Open Movie Maker is the brainchild of Bent Bisballe Nyeng, intended for an open and cross-platform alternative to the simple movie editing tool Windows Movie Maker.
It is based on three basic principles:
- Clips
- Effects
- Transitions
Clips contain images in a time line (frames), and can be made from a movie clip, an image (repeated) or simply a colour.
A clip can have several effects attached to it, in a certain order, that will be applied after the bottom frame has been read in.
These effects can for example be, overlay logo, brightness/contrast eq, scale/rotate/translate, and much much more.
The effects will be separated from the main program using a generic plug in architecture, so people easily can program their own filters.
Transitions are used when 'mixing' two clips on the time line.
A transition can be a cross fade, a slide, fade-to-black/fade-from-black and much more.
Like the effects the transitions will be plug in based.
Default only a single time line is intended, but layering might occur at some point 
All movie clips are intended to be used as they are, i.e. they will not be converted into a uniform format by the application when imported, and only copied to the project folder if the user wishes them to be.
This will save a lot of HD space, and badly encoded clips will not become even worse due to en re-encoding.
This off cause comes at the cost of potential performance loss, since a lot of decoding will be going on during play/export.
The file format will simply be an XML file containing references to the clips, effects and transitions used.
What will be used to achieve this
As the GUI framework the QT4 framework will be used, since it is highly portable and looks very nice
The decoding/encoding back end will at first be the ffmpeg library, since it is also highly portable, and supports a tremendous amount of video/audio formats. But down the road it is the intention to include more engines, to support even more formats.