A number of you have expressed interest in a tool for measuring distances in 2D.
I thought that the scope of such a tool would be too limited (pure 2D) and above all that it would be deceptive to use as you can’t know if it is reliable or not at the time you use it (and you can’t measure the error bias)

Under your repeated assaults I realized the obvious and I added a marker for length to the existing line tool.

In term of usage, any existing line can act as a reference, you seal its actual length through the contextual menu.
Each and every line present in the video will be impacted by the sealing. (The display of the length itself is still configurable on a per-line basis)

Some guidelines to reduce errors :
- Lines measured must be on the same plane.
- This plane must be strictly perpendicular to camera axis.
- The line segments must be close to the center (to minimize lens distorsion)
- Line segments must be close to a reference segment.
- If segments are on different frames, the video must be fixed (no pan/tilt)

You can test this feature in the experimental version available on the forum.

Kinovea received an award at Trophées du Libre 2009 finishing 3rd in Arts-Medias category

Other finalist projects were pretty impressive and it was very interesting to meet their authors.
In the end, a great week-end

Many thanks to all that sent usage samples, it helped illustrate the demo and share your perspective.

Kinovea is officially a finalist at the Trophée du Libre 2009 !

Trophées du Libre is an international contest for free software projects, organized by the Cetril a french free software promotion organization.
They award innovation in open source through several categories (education, sciences, corporate, multimedia, etc.)

It is a very exciting time for Kinovea and the opportunity to showcase the project during the ceremony, early june, aswell as a nice media coverage.

Here’s the video announcing the finalists in Media category (english):

You can check other finalists projects in all categories here

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of the latest stable release of Kinovea.
The main new features are the following:

• Drawings stay visible over several frames.
• Direct zoom into image (CTRL+Scroll).
• Trajectories suggestions with template matching.
• A new “Label Follows” mode for trajectories.
• Specification of the speed the video was captured into, to adapt timing.
• Localizations in Italian and Romanian.

Many thanks to all the persons involved in testing and translations !

Unless a critical hotfix is needed, this will be the last version of the 0.7.x series.
The effort to design and integrate camcorders capture, audio support, data output as table and motion special effects can now begin.