Hi Rob,

welcome back, and thank you for this careful mail. Your concerns are fair, so let me go through them one by one.

First the big picture. The Qt6 version is not a new program. We took the existing Cinelerra-GG code over one to one: the editing engine, the EDL, the plugins and the render paths are the code you know. Qt6 replaces the drawing layer underneath and adds native panels on top. The goal is not a prettier but weaker Cinelerra, it is the opposite. The old UI limited us in many places, and a lot of professional features we wanted were simply not possible with it. With Qt6 they are within reach, and we plan many of them.

The traditional version is not going away. It continues to be maintained, and fixes in the shared engine benefit both versions. The new professional features are developed in the Qt6 version.

What you see today is an alpha. Not everything is ported yet, so some things you rely on may still be missing or behave differently. That is exactly where reports like yours help us.

Keyboard. Every command now runs through one command table, about 300 commands, nearly all on their keys from the traditional UI. Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts... shows them on a drawn keyboard, and you can put any command on any key. Your two examples: In the last days we also brought back the remaining keys of the old main window. The alpha AppImage of 27 October does not have them yet, the next one will.

• Quit is on Ctrl+Q in the Qt6 version at the moment, not on Q. You can put it back on Q in Keyboard Shortcuts.
• Shift+R still triggers Render..., but it opens the Deliver page (render settings, presets and the render queue on one page) instead of the old dialog.

Windows on two monitors. The timeline is the main window. Every other panel (Viewer, Compositor, Resources, Effect Inspector and so on) is a dock that you can tear off into its own top-level window: drag its title bar out of the main window, or double-click it. Then put it on your second monitor. Window > Save Layout... keeps the arrangement, and Ctrl+Shift+F1 to F6 bring a saved layout back.

Popups over the main window. Good point, I have noted it. Dialogs should stand out more clearly from the window behind them. A screenshot of the case you mean would help.

Pretty versus power. Agreed, and that is why the keys came first. Another step in that direction is in the works: a remote control through which scripts and AI assistants can drive Cinelerra, every command and every effect, each step undoable. It is not in an AppImage yet.

Audio tracks drawn only half way. To reproduce it I need a few details: was it the traditional AppImage from August or the Qt6 alpha (and which date), what kind of clip (container, codec, length, number of audio channels), and at which point the waveform stops.

Build. Please tell me which repository you cloned (the traditional git or the Qt6 one), the commands you ran, your distribution and compiler, and the last 50 lines of the output. If it was the Qt6 repository built with CMake: CMake has a recursion limit that the Qt6 deployment helpers can hit, and running cmake with -DCMAKE_MAXIMUM_RECURSION_DEPTH=5000 is worth a try.

And please keep the list coming. Which power-user workflows do you use every day? Those are the ones we want to make sure the new version does at least as well.

Cheers
Sam

I've been away for a while dealing with family stuff but I noted that the last AppImage of the traditional UI cinGG is from august and more recently the app has a Qt interface.  I hope we are not seeing a switch from the traditional UI semantics, without continuing the power user functionality that existed for so long.

For a long time I considered that a UI based on a popular toolset was a good idea but abandonned that goal after looking at how heavily the old UI was embedded into the code.  Qt was an obvious choice.

So don't get me wrong, I congratulate the author's update, but would like to point out a few issues that should be addressed.

* The traditional UI accepted immediate mode commands entered from the keybord. While possible in Qt, it seems that operational mode is not active in the current Qt version.  When I type (q) on the timeline I want to see the "quit" dialog.  Likewise, <shift>R should immediately pop up the render dialog.

* I understand the current popular "wayland" position that  apps should each be managed by a single top level window and that somehow IPC between windows is a "cough cough" security bug...but! The workflow of content creation in a single window UI is greatly crippled by cramming everything in a single top level window.  I contend that each major function: timeline, compositor, and asset-management should have their own independent top level window.  I use a dual monitor configuration and need to be able to place function windows on independent monitors to space things out.

* color themes need to be better considered.  The default theme is fine, but when you introduce a popup like the global settings over top of the full screen app window, the content gets lost in the haze.  I'd contend that popups should use a different background color so their content becomes more ovbious.

* the new Qt UI is polished and very pretty.  PLEASE, don't favor pretty fluff over power user functionality though.  having to click a series of pulldown menus to reach a frequently used function is unpleasant.  Sometimes keyboard commands are "better" than point and click.

* a bug that seems to be prevalent in cinGG is that upon opening a clip, the default timeline doesn't fully render the audio tracks, but only for about half of the visible clip.  The full rendering doesn't take place unless I zoom in or out on the timeline time range.

Truth is that I am impressed with the Qt UI, but we need to maintain a aire of power user friendliness so that productivity doesn't take a backseat to asthetics.  I've always maintained that WYSIWYG is a bad concept and I prefer, "you aksed for it, you got it!"

For now I'm hoping the traditional UI app continues to be the main dev branch and receives ALL fixes and enhancements for the foreseeable future.

On a final note I recently pulled down the full git repo and tried to do a default build (use cinGG 3rd party libs) but the "build install" fails with a recurve out of memory error when trying to install certain plugins: I think ladspa stuff?

-Rob

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