# review of PiTiVi 0.13.x's render dialogs and project properties

The problems:

- redundant stuff creates confusion
- settings not remembered
- commonly used settings painful to reach for (especially due to the previous point)
- less commonly used settings thrown in random order alongside the more crucial settings (like bitrate and amount of passes)
- huge dialogs vs very small ones

Solutions:

- kill the settings in the project properties such as codec settings; only keep stuff that affects how the previewer behave (such as resolution)
- present more crucial settings in the main render dialog
  - kill the static labels, replace them by actual settings widgets
- save all settings used in rendering in the project; depends on bug #579531
- provide a "reset" button in the "advanced [codec] settings" dialogs

General design principles:

- the user won't care about setting the number of threads/cores manually; he wants to automatically squeeze as much juice as possible out of his multi-core processor without needing to think about it
- number of passes (and maybe some other quality settings like "decomb") should be controlled by one single checkbox: "draft mode" (no special effects, single pass, no deinterlacing, etc.)
- presets are not really that important, in my humble opinion; just making sure the container+codecs combo is actually valid, which we already do
- resolution, aspect ratio, should be derived from the project settings; the user would simply have to "scale" the image to the desired export size
- the project settings should allow entering metadata (title, author, copyright info, date, thumbnail, etc) that will be used in the render