For those of you following the project, you'll have noticed that things have been quiet on the Celluloid front for the past couple of weeks. You'll be excited to learn that we haven't been idling. If you pay attention to the site, you may have noticed some incremental updates in recent days -- we've been readying it for this announcement. As of today, some major updates have gone live. I'll give you a run down of the biggies:

Design Mode (non-linear editing):
We've finalized the interface for Celluloid's non-linear "Design" mode. The mock-up seen on the screenshots page will be the base model that we work on for the project's interface. The interface has seen some updates since the last post and overall been polished up quite a bit. Moreover, the mock-up on the screenshots page is now fully interactive -- mouse over the interface elements for descriptions and demonstrations of their functions. Mostly all of the elements are interactive in this way, but we've provided a guide highlighting the hotspots above the screenshot.

Source Mode (single source processing and transcoding):
With this update, we're re-introducing Celluloid's Source Mode -- a mode that we think will make Celluloid the premier transcoding app on the Mac. With this mode, one can select a source, be it a file, drive, or otherwise, and a destination file or drive, and filter and transcode to a plethora of formats using the GStreamer framework (or QuickTime framework, if you prefer). It comes fully loaded with batch processing functionality, a built-in script editor (the same as Design Mode's editor, so syntax highlighting and code-completion are included), live filtering and encoding previews, pause/resume functionality, and OS X's Console.app dumps. It is also very likely that Source Mode will see the light of day sooner than the fully-featured Design Mode is ready due to its simpler nature, so keep your eyes out. Furthermore, Source Mode's interface is not a mock-up like Design Mode's, but rather a product of real, live Interface Builder work. Source Mode's interface shell has already been checked into Celluloid's Subversion repository, and can be downloaded via websvn here. The interface can be seen in interactive form on the screenshots page, of course.

Collaborate:
Celluloid is breaking new ground in the editing field with its live, online collaboration feature. Whether it's over a local network, or across the world, Celluloid is going to allow you to share assets and edits with other editors working on the same project. Changes are highlighted in Celluloid's interface, and can then be selectively merged into your branch of the project. Assets may come from an online server, a public folder on your machine, or even from identical sources on individual editors' computers. We think this will make Celluloid a big hit for the massive, multi-editor projects popular among hobbyist editing communities. Overall, we're very excited to bring collaboration to the world of video editing, and we think you will be too.

ETA:
After much deliberation and in response to many comments from you, we're proud to announce an estimated, admittedly nebulous release time for Celluloid's first alpha and possibly beta. Right now, we're shooting for a Fall release, to coincide with the release of OS X Leopard and to give our devs some time to get all that summer work out of the way. We may have a working alpha as soon as next month, if all goes well.

Join in:
We've recently opened up shop on FreeNode (the same server as #avisynth, naturally), bringing Celluloid an official IRC channel. Since its inception, the channel has been relatively quiet, but we hope interested users will bring their feature requests and suggestions to the table and developers will come to discuss the project. Come on in, check us out, and idle for awhile. We appreciate the company ;)

All the buzz:
We also have a nice, new pool of over twenty randomly displaying images for the front page highlighting Celluloid's features. We think you'll like them :) The full list of images are here, for those interested. Other minor cosmetic improvements and polish have been added to the webpage as necessary, so take a look around.

The other good news is that with this long-time coming website update out of the way, Celluloid's interface finalized, and the transition of Avisynth 3 to Subversion, we're clear to set full speed ahead and move into a stage of heavy development. Look for lots of activity in the coming weeks as things ramp up into high gear. As always, you can keep a track of Celluloid's Subversion activity through the websvn interface, or simply check out the repository with your own Subversion client.

One final note -- we're overwhelmed to learn that Celluloid's project website has gotten over 100,000 hits in just a month of life. We're glad to see such enormous interest in the project and we hope you'll stay interested (and tell your friends!) and stay tuned as the project progresses.

Well, that's a wrap! Check out the new stuff, and enjoy! :)

-Michael