17 Jan

Get it? Smooth Scaling instead of smooth sailing? Anyway...

Are you tired of choppy motion and jerky zooming? Would you like silky smooth awesome motion? Well, you are in luck! OpenShot now has a new "Smooth Scaling" option, which as you might have guessed, makes scaling, animation, panning, and zooming very smooth.

Don't take my word for it, check out this video comparison of "before" and "after":


Technically, this is accomplished by using the recently updated "affine" filter in MLT. Dan Dennedy gets the credit for this update, as he added the code which makes it smooth. =) All animations, panning, zooming, and rotation are now smooth.

This feature requires MLT version 0.6.0+, which is not widely available yet. It should be included in Ubuntu 11.04, but older versions of Ubuntu will not be able to use this feature unless you can manually install the newest MLT libraries, which I would not recommend for the average user. If you are using an older version of MLT, this feature will disable itself, and should be backwards compatible. In other words, OpenShot will still work... just not with smooth scaling.

Eventually, I plan on removing this from the preferences, and just have it as the default method of scaling. But I'll wait until the MLT library has been updated in most distributions before I make that change.