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Building The Ultimate Video Editing Suite

Posted by simoniker on from the pan-and-zoom dept.

PlainBlack writes "Once upon a time, I was the Chief Engineer at a small TV station, but got out of that line of work about the time that people were talking about replacing video tapes with hard drives. Now I'm looking to build myself a professional grade editing suite using only open source tools so that I can dump as much money as possible into the hardware. My question to Slashdot is, what are the best open source tools for such a suite? I'll need both video and audio editing; a bank of wipes, fades, and other effects; a great paint program; and a titler (text overlays)."

3 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. VirtualDub by sreeram · · Score: 4, Informative
    I use VirtualDub only for editing home videos (i.e., not on a professional scale). But from what I can see, it is immensely powerful. Also, while it may not have the high-level features like fading-in/out that you seek (someone correct me if VDub can do these too), it does kick ass for low level editing (there is a ton of filters included within).

    Of course, it is open source.

  2. See also by Tune · · Score: 4, Informative

    Linux DV HOWTO on Kino plug-ins

  3. Very Little Out There by TheWanderingHermit · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've spent a good deal of time searching and there isn't much out there that's open source. My company is currently doing data mining, but that's only to pay for starting and running a video/digital film production company. I found Premiere to work well, but I'm planning to switch to Mac and use some of the tools available there. There is almost nothing available in open source for DVD authoring. There is some simple software out there, but it's command line and, while I'm used to console programs and do a lot of programming, when I'd doing something like editing (or DVD authoring), I want an easy interface so I can focus on what I'm creating, not on what I have to do to make my tools help me. (I've noticed an open-source-denial system that works like this: Question: "Why isn't there open source software that does this?" Programmer's Answer: "Why would you want to do that?" -- instead of admitting there is a desire for a program, but that there is little desire to develop that program.)

    I've looked into Main Actor (from mainconcept.com) and am considering using it. I've tried Cinelerra and found it frustrating to get up and running. Under KDE, there is KDEnliven, a video editor in an early stage of development (and, IMHO, the one with the most potential in the long run). There's also Jashaka (or Jakasha-- something like that), which I've heard has a good number of features, but is not well supported or backed for future development.

    From my point of view, there has to be at least one solid video editor that works with different formats, allows easy out to DV, VHS, and to AVI and MPG files, as well as a full featured DVD authoring program that makes it easy to import different video format files and allows easy GUI editing of the menus and play sequences.

    I've only been in the open source world for 2-3 years, and recently looked back to where things where when I started and where they are now. Video editing is still not a priority and not a task I'd expect to do with open source software. Judging from what I've seen in the past few years, though, I'm hoping it'll be there in another 3-4 years.