[CREATE] Call for proposals for GSoC Doc Camp, Mountain View Dec. 3-7

[Jehan Pagès]

Hi,

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 8:33 PM, Hong Phuc Dang <hp at fossasia.org> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I would like to follow up on ideas about improving documentation for
> graphics software with different people over the time.
>
> At the moment there is a call for documentation projects and
> individuals to invite proposals from Google, which needs to be
> answered until Oct. 26:
> https://sites.google.com/site/docsprintsummitv2/home

Interesting. I did not know this "doc sprint summit".
I have 2 questions though:

1/ They say "free documentation of free software". Which license is
the doc? Gnu FDL?

2/ They say "The books will be launched online in print and ebook
formats on the final day of the event". Do they mean it is going to be
sold (if they print it too, I would assume so)? If so, will part of
the gain be reversed to the participating project?
I know that would be their full right for Free Documentation to sell
it and keep all, but I imagine it is nicer if projects can gain a
little from it. Also that's nicer to be clear on objectives.

>     "Individuals and projects are invited to submit proposals for the
> GSoC Doc Camp to be held at Google's Mountain View headquarters
> (California) 3 December - 7 December.'
>
> Projects that participated in Google Summer of Code, will be preferred
> but others can also submit applications. I was involved as an admin
> with GSoC mentor organization FOSSASIA  this year, but there are
> projects like Blender, Gimp and Inkscape are in GSoC as well. I am
> currently in Mountain View participating at the mentor summit. I would
> be happy to work together with anyone interested in graphics related
> documentation sprints and get an application going.
>
> What are your thoughts about it?

I am working lately with a professional graphical animator (me being a
developer). We are working on making an animation fully with Free
Softwares.

We have tried a few Free Softwares and are testing them quite a bit
daily, hence have some idea about what exists and not, but there is
definitely more to know about the topic. Our current workflow
involves:
- GIMP for drawing. It could involve mypaint as well, or Inkscape for
vector animation (we do raster graphics, here).
- Blender VSE for non-linear sequencing. I know Cinerella is
considered one of the most advanced, but I have not fully tested it
yet. Blender VSE is already quite awesome. And we have tried kdenlive
because we saw it was quite used too. But it had some serious
limitations which provided it from being used with many video tracks
at once (tracks with alpha channel). That was a no-go.
- Compositing? Blender does some. Not sure of the full list of alternatives yet.
- Probably a mix of Ardour, Audacity, on a RT kernel for audio. It
could be synced with Blender VSE with Jack, if needed. But we have not
been there yet.
Someone on the GIMP dev mailing list said that Ardour + xjadeo are
also a valid solution to work on audio-video sync.
Another alternative would be that apparently Ardour is going to be
patched (or has already been) for basic video track support. This
would mean we could work on audio fully on Ardour, once the video is
rendered.
- Also I wonder if any solution exists for movie dubbing. Having
worked myself as actor in the field for years, this interests me,
because I have never seen this in Free Software world, and I have a
lot of feedback on the matter.
- There exists a bunch of programs for working, more or less
efficiently, on subtitles. I have only made basic tests on the matter,
found a few interesting programs, but none really awed me until now.
- There are some knowledge related to having hardware work with Free
Software (as it is not always that obvious), graphical tablets, but
also connecting cameras (we do some tests going this way), and such.
- Finally there is all the rest which is even less obvious. Like
making a professional working environment, like using a versioning
system (svn, git), usually used for code, work with binary data (xcf
files from GIMP, etc.). That's also a point I am testing a bit lately.

Basically FLOSS have a lot of nice softwares, some very advanced
(GIMP, Blender, etc.), some more limited or unstable. Some have very
nice individual documentation. But there are nearly none good and
complete, if at all, documentation for linking them all together in
order to make a full animated movie.
Note that this topic does not concern 2D animation (our main interest)
only. 3D animation could gain from such a documentation (they just
have less of GIMP/Inkscape/mypaint, more of Blender), and even movie
makers (I mean those with a video/cinema camera).
Also the presence of Blender people to the summit could help a lot
because they have quite an experience on the topic now, with all their
movie projects.

As far as I know, there is quite experienced people on the matter, but
there is no reknown documentation to gather this knowledge.
And we would be happy to work on it, if you are interested as well,
during this summit. That would be for our own benefit, and the
community's.

If you are interested, we can open a new project with our 3 names (and
any other person interested, maybe from the GIMP/Blender/other
project). Actually I think I will open it even if you are not because
that is very interesting. But I await your response first, of course!
What do you think of this proposition?

Jehan
Studio Girin: http://girinstud.io

> All the best,
>
> Hong Phuc
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