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VLC Team Announces Video Editor In the Works
eldavojohn writes "Despite news that VLC might not have anyone to work on the Mac release, Lifehacker brings word of a video editor that the VLC team is working on dubbed VideoLAN Media Creator. It hasn't been released yet (git clone git://github.com/VLMC/vlmc.git) but a pre-release is due out soon."
Can't go wrong with VLC, runs on every OS, opens even the PITA formats. Can't wait! Go VLC Team!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If it has the same quality and compatibility as VLC Media Player, then it would be a welcome beacon here in Penguin Land.
I've been waiting for this for a long time. I find it frustrating that I can play basically any video format at any resolution, while not being able to transcode. My computer obviously understands the video files, so why can't I take an .mpeg file and easily save it to quicktime format? All the open source video editing/transcoding tools are trash right now. A VLC video editor is going to be really awesome.
Hopefully it wraps Avisynth -- it's got some incredible community-made scripts and plugins that are unmatched by anything else, but isn't newbie-friendly when it comes to what most people think of as "video editing".
They’re out to get me!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Could this mean we finally get a decent video editor in Linux? Apologies to the Cinelerra, Kino, etc. people, but (and I really hate to say this) many of the simplest and cheapest Windows offerings put these projects to shame.
I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998.
sig: sauer
This might be a good time for all of you OSS leeches to front a little money to a project like this because, you know, you're the one's benefiting. Video editing is difficult; not like they wrote another frikkin' HTML editor. Time to stop working your jaws and pony up.
I would like something that can open anything and then edit it.
It would be nice to have a good video editor, One that was free back in the day was DDClip it worked pretty good back in 00' . Anythign is better than the abortion that is Windows Movie Maker....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Pretty please? I can transfer all the videos off of my Canon Vixia HG-21 to my linux box with a simple "cp -a ", but I haven't yet seen a Linux video editor that doesn't choke on the AVCHD files.
I'm hoping it take after Vegas, which leaves all other editors in the dust (even Avid) when it comes to ease of use. I especially like being able to drag the end of one clip over another on the time line for instant crossfades without having to deal with creating a transition. Fade in/out is a simple matter of dragging the upper corner of the clip one way or the other. Timelines are a series of thumbnails that change in real-time when you expand or contract, cut, stretch etc. (stretch/contract is a simple ctrl+drag). I rarely use more than 8 tracks, but the ability to do 16-32 would be nice, if not unlimited like Vegas.
Vegas and Photoshop are the only things keeping my workstations running Windows. (XP - not interested in Vista/7)
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
I guess I'll be the first to give a shout-out to Pitivi and Open Shot Video.
Reading Jonathan Thomas' ( Open Shot Video ) valiant attempt at creating a NLE from Gstreamer/Gnonlin it appears that the Gnonlin API/toolkit/whatever is VERY confusing to program a video editor in ( and unstable ). But since Jonathan chose MLT things are rapidly moving along for him. I often wonder why KDEnlive is so unstable because Kino is rock solid ( for me ) and it is also based on Dan Dennedy's impressive MLT toolkit.
But I truly believe that Pitivi will be the defacto NLE on linux. For the sole reason that Gstreamer is the defacto multimedia framework. It will probably be another five years before Pitivi is really a good stable functional application, and I say that because it took Gstreamer 10 years to do the same.
We have enough linear and crappy non linear editors.
We do? Linear video editing died with videotape and the advent of computer-based editing. Pretty much every computer-based editing system is non-linear, perhaps with the exception of those used for live TV, but even those systems are also capable of non-linear work, and are only used in a linear fashion because Live TV is, well, linear.
Can you point me to this multitude of linear editors which are still being released today?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Kdenlive is a pretty good video editor for Linux, FreeBDS and MacOS X.
Ever hear of Kdenlive? I use it all the time. Uses FFMPEG, has lots of nice effects, and the most recent release has been very stable for me so far ;)
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Avidemux always seemed like a natural partner to VLC to me. Based off the same FFMPEG code, QT or GTK interfaces, straightforward design, and despite the name it can do many file types. It's excellent for simple cut and paste editing, very much a Linux equivalent of Virtualdub. Why do so many free software projects try to reinvent the wheel rather reuse and improve on the code that is out there? I always thought that was the point of free software.
...when news articles contain revision control commands.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Hate to burst your bubble, Audition is basically what Cool Edit was in 1998 too. It hasn't changed a whole lot. (IMO)
Just because dozens of programs has the same way of doing something doesn't mean that it's wrong. The Gimp is for gimps. Doing things differently for the sake of being different doesn't cut it.
IMHO the program with the best potential at replacing photoshop, so far, is Pixelmator.
lolz, but really... this is the first time I've seen the "git://" protocol specifier. I had to resort to the Fount of All Knowledge to find out what in tarnation "git" is:
Ok, that doesn't tell me much, actually. And there's no reference at all to git://. I had to step away from Wikipedia and do a real search -- which ended up on the Git Wiki, of course.
I bet I'll end up seeing git:// all over the place on Slashdot soon. Once something better comes along, I might even understand it. (I just now figured out that whole "bittorrent" thing...)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I'm not OP and I'm love and use linux exclusively, but I have to agree with him. I've used about every video editor there is and (compared to other OSes standards) even kdenlive is a piece of shit. It has most basic features, and even some advanced ones, but at least on my three machines, its crashing left and right.
I personally think it's because of the sad state that linux multimedia subsystems are in (oss/alsa/pulseaudio/whatever kde comes with up next), but whatever it is, linux video editing is nowhere near windows or mac counterparts.
I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998.
Audacity does everything I want it to do. It doesn't include some of the functionality of tools like Adobe Audition or Soundbooth because that functionality is provided by other tools within the Linux environment.
If you need all this functionality bundled up with point-and-click ease, free Linux tools aren't for you. Free software developers simply don't have much incentive to provide that kind of bundling because for anybody who is skilled enough to develop such tools, the Linux approach of multiple small tools actually works better than bloated all-in-one Windows tools. Of course, over time, open source tools like Audacity will slowly incorporate some of the Windows tools' functionality and UI ideas, but that's just not a priority.
So it's really your choice: either pay Adobe to give you all-in-one tools (inferior, in my opinion), or invest the time and effort to figure out how to use the free tools effectively (a better long-term solution).
I will definitely give Kdenlive another look. It's been since 2007 since I looked at it, and I have to say I don't even remember what I didn't like about it.
sig: sauer
Despite news that VLC might not have anyone to work on the Mac release
You mean despite the news that was clarified and proven false by the VLC project the day after everyone in the blogsphere and on tech forums went nuts : http://www.osnews.com/story/22629/VLC_for_Mac_Death_Greatly_Exaggerated_
Why repeat it if it never was true ? It didn't need to be part of the summary at all for that matter, the true story here has nothing at all to do with the Mac port.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I'd say it's more pre-alpha.
I can't take seriously these project properties shown in the screenshot. "30 frames per second"? How do I use 29.97 exactly? 23.976? Where do I setup in the project properties that I want global de-interlacing using interpolation or blend fields or yadif? Or that it's progressive? Where do I tell the editor what the aspect ratio of my footage is?
And TWO preview panes? This is so last century.
That UI needs serious love btw, it looks extremely bad. Huge icons on the side of the pref dialogs, stretching the dialog UI vertically making it look super-ugly.
That's a tired, old argument that was laid to rest long ago. Nobody uses sox any more, and even command line editors like mencoder and ffmpeg take an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to functionality. Emacs is a great example (and arguably went overboard) of a popular app with many functions. I struggle to think of any modern-day Linux apps that hold true to the little app that could mentality. Maybe vi? But, then there's vim, so...
On a command line basis, your argument may hold some merit. But, in a GUI environment, it's ridiculous -- GUIs are the interface to pull all the little tools together. And in Audacity's case, it falls short. Not to mention it's really ugly.
sig: sauer
Pff, I use the Blender 3D Video Sequence Editor for my video editing :D
For me it was the same thing that adpe said: It crashes. Not as badly as Cinelerra, mind you, that's still king of the 'gone down quicker than your script can restart it' crowd, but it does have its fair share of them. Too many to be useful for me at least.
The FOSS movement needs this type of application. Linux needs to match the same type of applications than run or at least come standard with Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X in order to better compete with them. Since Apple has a video editor built into Mac OS X, Linux needs one as well. As a bonus a Windows port would get the Windows users happy to use a video editor and help them migrate to Linux by using the same software in Windows and then later on in Linux.
The creative content software that is usually made for Mac OS X needs FOSS counterparts in Linux and Windows so that Apple doesn't have a monopoly in that area. Although the video editing was once a part of the Commodore Amiga systems via Genlock and Video Toaster before the Macintosh had them, it is good to see a FOSS alternative to video editing coming out soon.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
PiTiVi (wp) seems interesting, not tried it myself so far.
MilkMiruku
Kdenlive was unusable for me in Ubuntu (Hardy and Intrepid). It crashed within a minute, every time.
If you want a multi-track recording suite, check out Ardour.
http://ardour.org/
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
I like VLC, don't get me wrong. It is a go-to program I use in many cases. The fact that it is entirely self contained makes it very useful. I use it in situations where installing the required codecs wouldn't be workable, and also to play back problematic media. For example at work I have Sony Vegas installed on my system which installs its own MPEG codecs. Now part of these codecs is they are really strict, they don't play broken media. Ok well and good, when you encode something you want it done right. However, there'll plenty of broken media floating around on the net. It'll play in most media players, but is incorrect per the spec. For this, I can fire up VLC, since it doesn't use the codecs that Vegas installs, rather than mucking about with which programs use which codecs.
However, its interface is pretty bad overall, and as you said, its encoding isn't great. As such it isn't my default media player, and it certainly isn't one I'll suggest as a default for non-tech people. It is a useful tool to get some jobs done, but it needs work over all.
Well, user interface becomes much more important in video editors because it is a much more complex task. The difference between a good editor and a POS could be as simple as the interface. No matter how powerful it is, if it is hard to edit with, it isn't useful.
That is the problem I've found with OSS video editors thus far. They are extremely hard to work with. One of them, I can't remember which, I couldn't make it talk to my DV cam, I couldn't seem to get it to open any media other than pictures, I couldn't get an editing timeline, nothing. That may have all been there but I couldn't figure it out. Now you compare that to Vegas or Final Cut and that is all extremely self explanatory (as well as well documented).
So I worry they might create a powerful tool that is crap to use, and thus not at all useful.
That's what I read when I read VLMC. MC is a bad acronym. It's also is potentially in conflict with Avid Media Composer (MC) which is an editing application.
Time to go back to the drawing board on that name.
I spent over two weeks trying to use VLC for live video feeds. It sucked. Badly. Sometimes we'd get video feeds. Other times the feed would show up as a black box. There was an inexplicable 2 second lag even though buffering was disabled.
All in all it was a pretty bad experience. Please fix VLC before moving on to other products!
That's a tired, old argument that was laid to rest long ago.
I'm not making an argument, I'm just stating a fact: Linux GUI tools don't have those functions because most Linux developers don't feel a need for them.
But, in a GUI environment, it's ridiculous -- GUIs are the interface to pull all the little tools together.
That's only one of many possible functions of a GUI. Many professional users don't need a GUI to "pull all the little tools together", they need a simple UI that does a few things really well and gets the routine work done quickly.
In fact, Adobe's "professional" tools often get in the way because they have so many functions squeezed into one UI that doing routine work requires many more clicks than it ought to.
Not to mention it's really ugly.
Who cares? The purpose of a GUI is to save me time, not to appeal to my sense of aesthetics. If an old Tcl/Tk GUI gets the job done quickly, I couldn't care less about how ugly it looks.
Long term, of course, it would be nice to support all possible audio, video, and imaging users on Linux. But Linux should find another way than Adobe-style bloatware.
Ive been using KDEnlive for the past few months and it does the job for us.
We basically want to take a few pictures and videos from our digital camera, join them with a few transition effects and put our fave mp3 in the background.
It does the job the way Windows Moviemaker does the job, its not a 25,000$ program but for the youtube generation's needs, its fine.
Ive tried all the different Linux programs and both my 8yr old and nieces prefer KDEnlive, so its the one we use.
Ardour looks really cool, and I installed it just last week. I got as far as getting an error message about not being able to load/connect to the Jack audio server (??) before I gave up.
I'll have to look into it more during the holiday break -- may have something to do with the fact that I'm a Fedora user, and we suffer from the PulseAudio affliction
sig: sauer
I'm agreeing on this. Or if developers aren't too willing to allow one project to consolidate with another, at least share some advice with the upstart project(s) in a friendly rivalry sort of way. At least the source is open, so they can figure things out, but the devs of the older projects could explain *why* they did some things a certain way. Spuring some real competiton by helping the newer projects get a better start sounds counter-intuitive, but it would give incentive for all the open source projects to improve across the board.
I'd say that collaborating with Wax and Virtualdub developers wouldn't be a bad idea either. Both of those are fairly good too. (Virtualdub + Xvid is an easy-peasy combo for the win when it comes to making nice compression of bloated .avi files) And perhaps even talk to the Audacity crew for integrating some features on the audio stream portion. Personally I'd like to see something that combines VirtualDub and Audacity in some common UI wrapper so I could easily synch audio to video with an open source solution. Maybe the VLC team would put together the equivalent?
BTW, it's nice news to hear from the VLC guys. And their software has come a long way UI wise. Still I have my critiques for them. I think documentation needs some filling in before they get started on a new project. The differences between codec settings and such don't make much sense to the average user with the current info that's provided. If I have trouble transcoding various streams/files and such with VLC and its current documentation, I'm not sure I'd feel compelled to use their software for video editing. (Also not all the help should be online, there should be some optional docs included during installation. This is so the user can figure out things even when there isnt' a good internet connection.) Once those rough edges are smoothed off, I think the prospects will look much better.
I dual boot WinXP and KDE4.3 desktops, so I use Windows MovieMaker and KDEnlive.
Its really at the same level of sophistication.
If you want to take some videos from your digital camera, do a few fade transitions and add your favorite songs in teh background, they both do the same thing.
Our kids love to take videos of their skateboard stunts-crashes and edit them together and it didnt take them long to get used to KDEnlive.
Ive tried all the Linux programs and KDEnlive is the one my kids and I prefer.
Can it be better? Of course. Having used it for the past few versions, the recent progress has been phenomenal so Id recommend giving it another shot to the latest version which is 2months old.
http://www.kdenlive.org/
I agree on cinelerra but not on Audacity. Audacity is like Notepad for audio, it's simple and does it's thing well (and doesn't crash which makes it actually better than notepad).
kdenlive is a piece of garbage, and its developers ought to be burned at the goddamn stake for making that abomination of a video editor.
VLC for Mac death is "greatly exaggerated" / What is Lunettes?
VLC for Mac is being maintained. However the old Cocoa graphical interface of VLC, is not being maintained at this time.
The reason is that we are in the process of rewriting a new interface for VLC. Its codename is Lunettes.
Why a rewrite? This is something really easy to see. VLC for Mac is just not "Mac" enough.
Taken from here.
Nobody uses sox? But I'm an Asterisk sysadmin, you insensitive clod!
And, besides my job, I find myself using ffmpeg and sox all the time.
And, what you are saying about the little app that could is totally wrong. First, it's not a GNU/Linux concept, it's a Unix concept, and part of it's design.
If you think there are no apps like that being used today, well, less, cut, awk, find, grep and friends would like a word with you. Sure, users don't use them, but the Unix toolchain is still the way we do things around here.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The site is up and running with more information http://vlmc.org/
"I know it makes me seem like a total douche to put down projects that many people put a lot of time and effort into, but come on! The sound editor front is even worse! Audacity is today what Cool Edit was in 1998."
Actually, it's not even as capable as Cool Edit was more than a decade ago. Specifically, Audacity does not support MIDI, whereas, AIR, Cool Edit Pro did. And that's the main reason why Audacity is utterly worthless for music production: because it can't sync to MIDI. So, no drum machine, or outboard sequencer loops.
That's why, when the Linux fanboys point their lofty sneers at lowly Windoze, I just shrug. My old Windows 98SE box allows me to sync my drum droid to Cakewalk 9 to lay down kick, hi-hat, and ride tracks. So I use that, instead of a Linux box, because it actually works. And, in turn, I use Windows 98, because the audio interface hardware I use (the original 16-bit Layla by Echo Audio) doesn't have drivers that work with XP SP3. (Nor, I should point out, does it have Linux drivers.) Since I can't afford new hardware, I use a Windows box that allows me to do stuff like this, which Audacity would not.
And it's sad that that's the case, because I would like to be able to use Audacity on Linux, rather than Cakewalk on Windows.
But I can't.
So I don't.
Check out my novel.
I haven't done any video editing it in around 6 months, so I don't know what's their current status, but it did get noticeably more stable for me around the 0.7.3 version. Ah the wonders of Arch and rolling releases ;)
It would still crash occasionally, though. The only saving grace is that it's auto-save is impeccable.
I've not tried it myself, but I've heard good things about OpenShot. I'd be interested to hear what people on here think about it.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I've also heard very good things about OpenShot Video Editor (http://www.openshotvideo.com/), although I've never used it myself :)
and doesn't crash
...but when it does, or when the computer crashes by no fault of Audacity’s, you’re fucked.
All those 1-second .au files? Yeah. Audacity helpfully offers to delete them for you, but what you really wanted to do was recover your work... which it can’t do... so you’re stuck with the tedious, boring task of importing dozens or hundreds of tiny audio clips to try and recover the audio that you recorded before it crashed.
Why there is no way to do this automatically is absolutely beyond my comprehension.
Come to think of it... if all you want to do is record your aux/line/mix straight to MP3, you might actually be better off just using VLC. Plus it transcodes the audio on-the-fly so you don’t even have to wait for the project to be exported to MP3 like in Audacity. Even if you do want to edit the audio, you could always import it into Audacity later.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
check out Audacity Recovery Utility - worked for me the one time I needed it.
http://www.mesw.de/audacity/recovery/
This is exactly what both Windows and Linux needs right now.
In Windows our only free choices apart from the crippled Windows Movie Maker (limited in too many ways) are nightmarish utilities or trial versions of payware (like VideoPad).
In Linux there are certainly projects out there, but they either seem to have stalled in development, been abandoned, crash all the time, or we're waiting oh-so-patiently for v1.0 to arrive.
This new VLMC looks like it should really hit the spot. They have a YouTube page with this demo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02vdwNsvbZI&hd=1
and with a bit more polish, transitions and effects it should be all that many of us need. Well done to the team, I for one am looking forward to the first release in February.
Heck, if they could put together a quick Live CD/USB iso so that I could play with it, I'd test it too :) (I'm not up to getting it running as it is but I've played with Ubuntu and Linux Mint ok)
Good to know. Thanks.
It looks like I had an older version of Audacity, anyway... according to that, versions beyond 1.3.2 have crash recovery built-in. I guess I’ll have to upgrade.
Since I don’t do long recordings in Audacity anymore anyway (that ended about 5 months ago), it’s really not an issue for me anymore, but it had been in the past, and always on a non-net-connected computer which made it difficult to Google up some solutions. (They’re probably still using that old version of Audacity now that I’m gone... and I really don’t care. It’s their problem now.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Agreed. I'm secretly hoping the Videolan folks will prove to be the ones to get it right. We need something stable, cross-platform (including Windows!) and compatible for starters. If VLMC can be to the NLE world what Avidemux is to the simple video editors world, that will be an important step in improving the viability of Linux. Anything that challenges Premiere and Vegas is good.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)