Blick 0.1.0

New Features

• Blick is now licensed. Enter your license key from Help > Enter license key, or buy one from Help > Purchase license. Without an active license you can still create, edit, save and export projects, but opening existing projects and importing XML timelines are locked, and the title bar shows an UNLICENSED badge.
• Update notification: Blick checks whether a newer version is out and shows an "Update available" button in the title bar, Blick does not send any information to the server, it merely checks a link to see if there is a new update; click it to go to the download page.
• Recent projects: the File menu now has a "Load recent project" submenu listing the projects you opened last.
• Audio amplitude automation directly on the clip: every audio clip now carries an Amplitude effect by default, and you can add, drag and delete its keyframes right on the clip in the timeline (hold shift to add, alt to delete).
• Editable track names: click a track's name in the track header and type to rename it.
• Deletable tracks: delete a track from its right-click context menu, with a confirmation that tells you how many clips are going with it.
• Render range start: a new "Begin frame" control in the Render panel, set the start of the render output range to the playhead or reset it back to automatic, matching the existing End frame control.
• New Contrast Type on the Brightness & Contrast effect: pick between Linear and S-Curve, with an adjustable Contrast Midpoint.
• Playback end behaviour toggle next to the transport controls: either stop at the end of the timeline, or stop and jump back to the start.
• New Play/pause and rewind buttons next to the timecode.
• Rotation metadata support: footage recorded rotated (phone video) now displays and composites in the correct orientation, with correctly rotated selection rectangles and handles in the monitor.
• Third-party licenses are now viewable in the app from Help > Show third-party licenses.

Improvements

• Media now loads across multiple threads, so dropping in a batch of assets or opening a project with a lot of media is considerably faster.
• Loading indicator in the media panel while assets are being prepared.
• Hovering a font in the Effects panel previews it, and dropdown lists in general now preview the entry you're hovering.
• Middle-click a panel tab to close it, with a highlight showing which tab is about to close.
• Popups now have a close button.
• Keyboard navigation for the title bar menus on Windows.
• Reset buttons next to the default paths in Settings.
• The effect limit was raised and transitions from 1024 to 8192, and hitting either limit now tells you in the status bar instead of silently failing or creating a clip that can't hold its effects.
• Settings are now saved periodically instead of only on exit, and written atomically so a crash can't corrupt or lose them.
• Splitting a clip or a linked group now leaves only one side selected, so you can immediately move just the part you split off.
• Centering a clip now takes its anchor into account.
• Forward and back slashes count as word separators in text fields, for editing paths.
• The anchor crosshair in the monitor only shows while you're hovering the monitor panel, to not obstruct your view while editing a selected clip.
• Smooth, judder-free window resizing on macOS.
• The Blur effect is disabled for now, its performance was not acceptable. It will come back once it's rewritten and improved.
• The monitor panel now renders rotated highlight rects correctly, and rotated box edges can be dragged to resize.

Bugfixes

• Fix a crash when dropping files onto the window, caused by a race condition in the drop handling.
• Fix a crash when dragging files into Blick on macOS.
• Fix a crash when opening media that has an unusually large number of streams.
• Fix several crashes caused by zero-sized allocations inside the internal slot maps.
• Fix a use-after-free crash in the internal work queue.
• Fix possible memory corruption while sorting UI panels.
• Fixed a number of Metal renderer instability crashes and issues.
• Fix a memory leak when the composition target is resized (Direct3D 11).
• Fix a memory leak during encoding.
• Fix an OS handle leak on Windows that caused files to remain open after removing the media item.
• Multiple media loading/unloading cleanup and leak fixes.
• Fix .mov files stalling or hanging on playback.
• Fix compositing against a background that isn't fully opaque, and fix alpha premultiplication in the compositor.
• Fix waveforms shimmering while scrolling the timeline horizontally, on both the Direct3D 11 and Metal backends.
• Fix text being typed into fields on macOS while Command or Control is held.
• Fix the autosave menu on macOS showing greyed out or empty entries.
• Fix autosave and config files targeting the wrong cache folder.
• Fix a window size of 0,0 being written into the config.
• Fix clicking in a text field landing on the wrong character when the text contains non-ASCII characters.
• Fix crash when selecting unicode text in the text editor.
• Fix locked clips still being movable.
• Fix wrong delete behaviour on overlapping clips.
• Fix hit-testing in the monitor, and make deselect-all work in the monitor panel too.
• Fix new text clips defaulting to the wrong anchor.
• Fix context menu popups not receiving mouse input on Windows.
• Fix the Settings menu overflowing the window at large UI scales.
• Fix the contrast type not being stored in the project file.
• Fix tab close button spacing and click behaviour.
• Fix going into idle mode during playback.
• Performance improvement by removing redundant compositing work by detecting when the composite inputs actually changed.
• Fix the bundled FFmpeg libraries not being properly signed on macOS.
• Multiple minor visual and stability fixes.
• Add Ukrainian localization.