Hacker News Reader

Comment by trog | Hacker News Reader

I was an early Kickstarter backer of this project and have been really impressed with the progress.

I try most released and think it has a lot of potential but I seem to run into basic problems all the time.

I grabbed the new version this morning to try a basic trim of a mobile video from my phone. The video imported fine but when I changed the video format to portrait mode, I wasn't able to resize the video to fit into the frame. Trying to scale it just made it go crazy - some weird maths error in the resizing, maybe?

I'm sure it works fine for a bunch of other use cases but I just seem to always have bad luck with what I try to do! Would love to see more focus on core, basic features and making them rock solid.

View on HN

> "Would love to see more focus on core, basic features and making them rock solid."

This seems to be a perennial problem of open source content creation tools, ever since GIMP in the 1990s.

Developers love to tinker on fancy individual features — stuff like the "AI and computer vision" mentioned in this release's headline — but the core workflow gets no love and/or is actively designed against the expectations of users trained on commercial products.

There are of course successful counterexamples. Blender has managed to overcome this perception by changing its UI and engaging with artists. Krita is an open source painting program clearly designed by domain experts, not just CS students looking for an algorithm playground.

> Blender has managed to overcome this perception by changing its UI and engaging with artists

The UI might be designed well but at least from my experience it is still buggy and freezes [0] regularly. I fully agree that the core functionality absolutely needs to be rock solid.

[0] I was attempting to model a basic room with some wall details. During a few hours that I have spent on it in Blender, I have encountered several unexpected gimbal locks which consumed all CPU resources and from which it was impossible to recover.

I am using Linux and Wayland and Sway. Yes, some might argue that this is a relatively new and less common setup and that I should give Blender some slack here. But still, it was a very off-putting experience. I can fully understand that some users might never want to use Blender again after having to deal with such basic issues.

Maya crashes all the time. Go on any social media and search 'maya crash' and you'll find plenty of art students and hobbyists complaining about how often it crashes, some losing their work. I even read from one artist I follow that at their university a lecturer told his students to expect Maya to crash, and prepare for it.

I just wanted to point out that your lockups and crashes in Blender have nothing to do with it being open source and probably more to do with its complexity. Not saying you were trying to make out that because it's foss that's why it crashes, but seeing as this comment thread branched from that argument I just wanted to point this out.

> it's foss that's why it crashes

I am not making such an implication.

In my opinion, Blender's software quality is simply lacking in some very basic areas. At the same time, it is great in some other areas. I absolutely do not suggest that commercial or proprietary programs are generally better in that regard.

I only wanted to emphasize the point in one of the parent comments that it is critical, even for established software with large user bases, to get the basic features right and stable and support it by some anecdotal experience.

Surely Blender's internal math is quaternions? Not that I can code those, but I didn't think gimbal locks were something that could bring down something like Blender.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com