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I am proud to announce the immediate availability of OpenShot version 1.2.2! We have been hard at work on this version since April 2010. While a 5 month long release cycle was not really what I had planned on, I'm happy to see this version finally get released!

Round of Applause
Before I give you a run down of the new features, I want to take a moment to thank all the great and talented people who stay up late with me working on this project. Andy Finch has been helping me since the very first days of OpenShot, and without his help, OpenShot would probably not be here today. Olivier Girard is one of the biggest promoters of OpenShot, writing articles, assisting new users, and was the primary contributor to the awesome OpenShot help manual. Maël Lavault has been a huge help on LaunchPad, answering questions, submitting patches, and was a huge help on this latest version. To all the people who have helped me, THANK YOU SO MUCH for making OpenShot the great application it is today!

Getting Started
Now, let's talk a bit about version 1.2.2. Where did 1.2.0 & 1.2.1 go? Why did we skip straight to 1.2.2. Well my friends, that is an interesting story, but one for another day. Just know that 1.2.2 is the official release, and it's awesome! I might be a little biased, but seriously, this is a really great release.

Video Highlights
As is tradition, I have used OpenShot to create a short video showcasing some of the new features. I mixed in some great overly dramatic music, and a few screen-casts to create a true masterpiece. Okay, I admit, the video is not quite a masterpiece, but if I said that, nobody would watch it.

OpenShot 1.2 Highlights from Jonathan Thomas on Vimeo.

New Features:

• Improved Stability
• 3D Animated Titles (powered by Blender 2.5)
• Custom Transitions
• New Audio & Video Effects
• Time-line Improvements / Animations
• Improved Effects User Interface
• Improved Theme Engine (New netbook friendly theme)
• Razor Improvements (now supports snapping to play-head)
• Improved Language Support (Rotate effect now works in all locales)
• New DVD Export (Create compliant DVD images)
• Improved Preferences Dialog
• Improved Exporting of different frame-rates
• Numerous Bug Fixes

Let me dive into more depth on a few of these new features, and provide some screen-shots for your viewing pleasure.

3D Animated Titles

We have taken the power of Blender, some really cool animated title templates, and mixed them together with the simple and user-friendly style of OpenShot to create a truly unique feature. Everyone can now enjoy creating their own animated title sequences! Of course, none of this would be possible without the great Blender open-source 3D animation package! Colin Levy, the director of Sintel, even contributed a slick title animation to OpenShot! Blender has so many good features, but most are difficult for the average user to tap into. I hope that we can expand this relationship even further in future releases.

Many new effects have been added to this release. However, a few effects had to be removed, due to crashes and instability on some systems. We replaced the missing effects with even cooler ones, so no tears. My favorite new effect is called Chroma Hold. This effect turns your video into grayscale except for 1 color. I've seen this effect used on TV commercials many times, and now we can all use it!

Timeline Improvements & Animations
We have added lots of polish and some subtle animations to all clip and transition movement, which is easier for the eye to follow. For example, clips that are not placed in a valid spot, smoothly (but quickly) animate back to their correct location. Clips that are removed animate into a dot and disappear. Same for transitions.

Improved Theme Engine (Netbook friendly theme)
The code that draws the time-line and buttons (our theme engine) has been drastically improved. Now theme artists can not only change the images, but the height, width, offset, position, alpha, and color of items. In theory, almost any video editor interface can now be created... assuming some artists want to jump in and help out. Also, a new theme was designed for netbook screens, taking advantage of the new theme engine.

GTK 2.18 Required
Okay, so what does this mean? In Ubuntu terminology, you must have Ubuntu 9.10 or greater to run this version of OpenShot. The glade library (which we previously used to display our interface) has been depreciated, and so we moved onto just using the GTK library. Many of the GTK features we are now using only work on GTK 2.18+, so with the assumption that most users are on 9.10 of Ubuntu (or greater), we decided it was not worth the effort to back-port to previous version of Ubuntu. However, it is possible (in theory) to adapt OpenShot to Ubuntu 9.04, but that's about as far back as possible, without recompiling GTK... and who wants to do that. =)

Download Today
The OpenShot PPA is the easiest way to install (and stay updated). It works on Ubuntu 9.10 and greater. Just follow the easy instructions, and enjoy! However, if you would rather download the DEB installers, you can do that as well.

Fun Fact
Did you know that in Kerala, India, a high-school textbook is including a chapter on OpenShot to be taught at all the schools in their city? How cool is that!

Conclusion
Thanks again to all the blog readers, users, supporters, translators, programmers, artists, directors, packagers, donors, and of course to my wife, Cindy, who allows me the time to work on this project.

Download OpenShot today and create some amazing videos... just be sure to tag your videos on YouTube as "Created with OpenShot, Yo!". Okay, you can leave off that last part, and just include "Created with OpenShot".