Video Support

The integration of a video timeline and video monitoring into Ardour allows for convenient audio mixing and editing to video (i.e. soundtracks, music videos, TV post production etc.)

The new functionality allows users to:

• Import a single video and optionally extract the soundtrack from it.
• Provide a Video-monitor window, or full-screen display, of the imported video in sync with any of the available ardour timecode sources.
• Display a frame-by-frame (thumbnail) timeline of the video.
• Time-offset the video.
• Lock audio-regions to the video: Move audio-regions with the video at video-frame granularity.
• Export the video, cut start/end, add blank frames and/or mux it with the soundtrack of the current-session.

Furthermore, the setup is modular and can be configured in different ways, including:

• One machine: all video decoding, video monitoring and Ardour audio
• Two machines: separate video-monitor and Ardour
• Three machines: separate video-server (for timeline decoding and file-archive), dedicated video-monitor and Ardour

Video support in Ardour does not:

• allow for more than one video to be loaded at a time.
• provide video editing capabilities

Other New Features and UI Changes

• chain together LV2 plugins that accept and output MIDI data
• OSC access to send gain parameters (via /ardour/route/send/gainabs rid sid gain and /ardour/route/send/gaindb rid sid gaindB)
• window management (layering and related issues) overhauled to work better on both platforms and with more window managers
• horizontal scrolling of the timeline is now done with shift-wheel and track height adjustment is done using alt-wheel (matches OS X conventions)
• German and French translations improved
• Allow a pre-existing selection to override region grouping if the clicked-on region is part of that selection
• Plugin editing tweaked:
  • Always show plugin's own UI (if available) on double-click
  • Alt+double-click -> show 'generic controls' (GUI built by Ardour)
  • Context-menu offers both choices.
  • Use Tooltip for to make it discoverable.

Bug Fixes

• some licenses fixes in source code files
• properly handle closing of various file descriptors, to fix issues with LinuxDSP plugins and xjadeo
• fix AudioUnit GUI window sizing
• improve relationship between ArdourDialog and Splash on OS X
• hack up AU GUI support to handle AUSampler resizing better.
• fix operation of right-click on selected MIDI note to bring up the note editor. this is still not really right long term, but it is better than displaying the channel selector
• fix crashes and session file corruption caused by not zeroing text buffers passed to VST plugins (from Mixbus)
• fix crash on export if no master bus is present in the session
• On OS X, use "hw.physicalcpu" to get a more accurate CPU count (the previously used "hw.ncpu" count includes hyperthreading cpus)
• Text in warning window for memory limit not displayed in full.
• fix jack session filename (colons are invalid)
• when using a MIDI keyboard for step entry of MIDI data, use the note length set in the step entry dialog
• Remove special handling of session range in export. Fixes things when the session range is renamed.
• Fix loading of old sessions' previously-used export timespans
• Various LV2 plugin handling fixes
  • skip LV2 ports on GUI according to port-properties: notOnGUI and reportsLatency
  • honor LV2 rsz:minimumSize for Atom Event buffers
  • properly clean up LV2 world
  • lilv_port_get() for LV bufsize query requires new lilv
  • lilv-backwards compatible min buffer-size implementation
• fix memory leaks and compiler warnings in LXVST code
• fix an unusual problem in some LinuxVST plugins by disabling symbol export
• when a track has audio and MIDI output, display an audio fader rather than a MIDI fader (this is a display change only - the fader has effect on all MIDI and audio data passing though it regardless of the type of fader shown)
• prepare font-styling meter labels
• decrease size and weight of midi-velocity - make '127' fit,...
• use correct quoting in OS X startup script (allows passing of arguments on the command line)
• add test for writability of /usr/local/lib in OS X startup script (notifies user about an issue created by Audacity)
• save and restore Generic MIDI threshold/smoothing value
• fix crash when using internal edit mouse modes to drag a non-MIDI region

Contributors

Robin Gareus, Adrian Knoth, John Oliver, Sakari Bergen, Colin Fletcher, Paul Davis

Translation work by: Robin Gloster (de) and jpeg129 (fr)