Don't they call it 'render farms'?
I will add cloud features, I don't want to deal with massive files hosting. Maybe login box to G. Drive or 1Drive could be a solution.
Probably the dev needs to use a different method to save (effectively download), much as Adobe Photoshop does when it exports files on Firefox. Not hard to do at all. Likely the same for reading files, if this tool needs that.
OPFS provides high-speed read and write for temporary files and non-exported files; again this is what Photoshop uses. There is a 10GB limit per domain currently. I'm not sure this particular app actually needs that, though
I had previous experience doing editors, and I am not ashamed to admit ChatGPT gave me a hand on some features I was not comfortable with, like editing audio in javascritt for example.
Thank you for your feedback,
the 30fps limit is temporary, until I have fully tested perfs with video files at a higher framerate
can you tell me more about 'and let go with momentum', not sure what you mean? Is it about loss of precision, not being responsive, bad snapping to closest frame?
When I click and drag on the timeline play bar or a key frame widget in a layer; then, if I release the mouse button with velocity; the play head and key frame keep moving for a little bit, even though I am not dragging them anymore, as though they have momentum and are being dragged to a stop; the widgets should not behave this way.
The big picture feedback is that often there is an alignment between “I have a lot of ideas for unique UX I want to implement” and “I want to wake up this morning and work on this all day.” IMO just copy AE’s UX affordances first if your goal is to make something you want other people to use. Blender spent a decade in the doldrums until it found an audience the moment they relented and copied Maya and Unity’s superior, conventional controls.
> IMO just copy AE’s UX affordances first if your goal is to make something you want other people to use.
@clementpiki I second this advice and strongly suggest to document it as a guideline for your project as soon as possible. Surf on the shoulders of AE's UI giants!
Otherwise a small but vocal number of devs users who implicitly love FOSS software will end up rationalizing all the little UI quirks as features. Worse, their lack of expertise in UI design will be proportional to their level of energy and post length on all your communication channels. It's the epitome of bike-shedding. But if you just standardize on "whatever AE does" nobody will spend a moment advocating for putting quirks into the UI. (Plus they'll be very forgiving about quirks since it's obvious that getting the UI to work exactly like a proprietary piece of software is a very difficult problem.)
The greatest failing GIMP had (and still does) is that has almost nothing in common with Photoshop UI-wise - or numerous other photo editing tools. I've used them all my life and every time I open GIMP, I can't seem to do anything.
It's like walking into a car dealership and they tell you their car is free, and you ask where the seats are, and they say "why, on the ceiling, of course. We didn't want to copy all those other car companies."
You pop open the hood and there's no engine. "Where is the engine?" "On the roof!"
"Where is the gas tank?" "It's that plastic bag you keep on your lap."
Although this seems like the right way to go about it, isn't there some kind of limit to how much you _can_ copy AE before it becomes a copyright issue?
You can't copyright capabilities. I believe an exact copy of AE is perfectly legal so long as it isn't fooling people into thinking it's AE, and doesn't use any of the original code.
The visual look can be protected, some novel or distinctive features can be patented or trademarked (like Amazon patented one click purchases??), but the core functionality is up for grabs
The big Oracle / Google lawsuit a few years back is a good example. Google rebuilt the Java compiler to avoid paying licencing fees (?), and argued that because they did it from the API specs, without referring to the existing code, it was aboveboard. The functionality is not copyrightable, just the specific implementation.
Have you considered opening a staging or experimental branch on a subdomain perhaps? I think people would definitely be interested in testing out new features before they're released without hosting it themself, and I believe you said hosting Pikimov is very cheap.
This is easiest to do by moving things far too fast, if I pick up a ball and 'flick' it with my mouse, then let go of the button and mouse, the ball ends up moving along further.
If you can't duplicate it, I can send you a short screen recording (I would just upload, but where do you upload <1MB binary files nowadays that isn't an ad-filled mess?)
Not yet, but it has already been asked several times, so I'll keep that in mind. There's balance hard to find: should I try to make it as complete as AE, or make it a simpler so it's more accessible.
If you are advertising it as an after effects alternative (which it looks like you are) then you should be trying to include all features that after effects has.
If most people use 20% of the features of an app, and you create an app that covers these most popular feature really well I think it's fair to call it an alternative. It doesn't say "full clone" or "feature parity".
I could not seriously pretend of a 'feature parity', if I can match 10% of features, that should good enough for most users. I'm not expecting the next Marvel movie to get its SFXs done with PIkimov.
Without Analytics, I'm blind: I can't tell which feature are popular and which aren't. I need those infos to undertand where I should focus, what are users the more interested in.
By "Privacy respected", I meant that I am not asking you for your email, your name, and what you do on the editor stays on your machine: no cloud uploads of your files.
> Without Analytics, I'm blind: I can't tell which feature are popular and which aren't.
There's plenty of alternatives to google analytics though. This sort of basic breakdown could be done with goaccess (or an awk one-liner); plausible, matomo or simple analytics would be decent options that cover most reasonable requirements.
> Without Analytics, I'm blind: I can't tell which feature are popular and which aren't. I need those infos to undertand where I should focus, what are users the more interested in.
I have a suggestion which has always served me well: Ask. Or don’t even ask, users will tell you what they want anyway. Analytics will only give you skewed information, as you are unable to distinguish the popularity of a feature is due to its usefulness, its prominence, or a general lack of clarity.
That's a totally reasoble way to do it, but it leaves you with other blindspots
People will tell you what they want anyway but also, sometimes people aren't aware of what they want or need
Non visible parts of aproject tend to get neglected a lot more if you just ask your users
What will get more people talking to you, a 10% speed up split among many small interactions, or a visual glitch that doesn't affect usability but it's front and center?
> sometimes people aren't aware of what they want or need
And analytics won’t tell you that, so I don’t see your point.
> Non visible parts of aproject tend to get neglected a lot more if you just ask your users
Do they? Perhaps if you keep relying on analytics, they do. In my experience, users will just tell you anyway. And some of them will be better at feedback than others. Treasure those.
Also, and this is another topic, why don’t you use periods in your sentences? Your comment was unnecessarily hard to parse.
I'd say Analytics can give you an aditional data point that can guide you to conclusions your users might not / can not be aware of. For the same reason you'd want to track things personal experience would be unreliable with.
A good example is time tracking, people are notoriously bad at this, ignoring non events that consume time and over assigning time to task that demand attention
On the other topic, no real reason. I just suck at prose; I'll take the comment in consideration to improve that. That comment in general is just poorly written all around, I'd love to edit it, but the time window has passed
What exactly is tracked though? What information about my videos and my usage patterns are send to Google?
It would be great if you could use a self-hosted analytics platform instead! :)
And I would strongly advise not to develop based on anonymous analytics, users might tell you different desires if you ask them and use completely different workflows if added. Optimizing for web analytis metrics has ruined many projects.
While doing my testings, it does not appear that a tab is limited to 4GB. A typical project in After Effects is not longer than a few minutes of duration. Let's say you work on a 2 hours movie, each AE project would be about a 1 minute shot where sfx need to be applied. Pikimov was created with the same behavior in mind, not made to edit a full movie in one go
