GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 683220
Thoroughly document how to do rendering
Last modified: 2015-10-20 12:55:31 UTC
A common pain point for users is understanding how to use the render dialog, even though its design is much better than what it used to be. The user manual explains the difference between rendering and saving, but does not really go into detail regarding: - What influences quality. - What codecs can be recommended depending on the context - Also document how to make bitrate/quality work depending on the codecs,, at least with theora, x264 and vp8: bug 593466#c4 - Troubleshooting rendering errors or hangs. See also https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+faqs?field.actions.search=Search&field.search_text=pitivi - Some codecs require video resolution width and height to be multiples of 4, 8 or 16. Typically, always make sure that they're at least multiples of 2. Otherwise, some video codecs won't encode at all, sometimes they'll encode with suboptimal or broken results. - Speed: many codecs such as theora, x264 and vp8 have a "threads" option that you can set. For example, set it to 4 to have four simultaneous threads and better use your quad core processor. As such, rendering will be much faster. See also bug #573395 and bug #667653. - Commandline rendering will be removed from pitivi 0.16 (the GES version), because "ges-launch" does that kind of thing. It can load a pitivi project and render it. ges-launch is also able to preview (playback) a pitivi project. ges-launch -p projevct.xptv -ro outpufile.o See also (in the "help/C/" directory): codecscontainers.page, gstreamer.page, presets.page, projectsettings.page, rendering.page.
Oh yeah, and a personal note: whenever this gets accomplished, we should totally have a contextual help button in the rendering dialog, that opens the relevant mallard help page directly (we've already got the infrastructure for that in the show_user_manual function in utils/misc.py :)
This bug has been migrated to https://phabricator.freedesktop.org/T2977. Please use the Phabricator interface to report further bugs by creating a task and associating it with Project: Pitivi. See http://wiki.pitivi.org/wiki/Bug_reporting for details.