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OpenShot Video Editor Reaches Version 1.0
An anonymous reader writes "After only one year of development Jonathan Thomas has released version 1.0 of his impressive NLE for Linux. Based on the MLT Framework, OpenShot Video Editor has taken less time to reach this stage of development than any other Linux NLE. Dan Dennedy of Kino fame has also lent a helping hand ensuring that OpenShot has the stability and proven back-end that is needed in such a project."
People were used to film and analog video tape editing systems. The simplest editing system for video in e.g. VHS was to have two video decks, one for playing, the other for recording. You had to wind/rewind the source tape, press play on the source deck, wait for the right time to press the recording button on the destination deck, etc. It was a pain.
There were more sophisticated editing systems. But it was difficult to have frame accurate editing even then. You needed an embedded timecode in the video signal. Some camcorders came with this built in. You needed special video decks that ensured frame accuracy as well. Some video decks came with a jog/shuttle for easier editing control.
Initial software video editing systems did not store the video on the computer. Computers were too slow and had limited storage to do that. I mean, can you remember 20MB hard disks being standard? Imagine storing and playing back video using a system like that. Or worse. Just not feasible. Especially when a VHS tape could store like four hours of video.
So software for video editing just controlled the tape decks. The tape still needed to wind/rewind so this was not a non-linear video editing system. NLE only started being used once you could actually store the video in the computer or whatever.
I just installed it on my Ubuntu 9.10 system and through together some short clips I had laying around and not only did it work exactly the way I expected, but when I exported them in a couple of different formats it was very fast (I tried Kino a while back and not only did it take a long time to import clips, the export was also very slow.) I'm really glad I read this story today.
All these replies miss the mark.
Before video there was film. Editing film means finding the strip of film with shot you want, cutting it out, and splicing with tape or cement to some other footage. That's what's meant by "cutting film" and is where the editing term "cut" comes from. A cut is the simplest form of edit. Clip by clip you splice together the story. You can start anywhere you want but when it's done, the beginning of the movie is at one end, the head, and the end of the movie is at the other, the tail. Shot by shot your story plays out from beginning to end on your edited reel of celluloid. If you decide you want a shot between two others, you cut the splice between the two shots and splice the new strip of film between them. It's easy to understand and very flexible.
When video came along editing changed and things got very inflexible. It is not practical to splice video tape because the image is not human readable and the video signal is too complex to make a simple noise free edit. The only way to edit video tape is to copy shots from a source tape to your master tape, assembling the video from the first shot to last, in order. If you make a mistake, you back up to the mistake and begin again. In video tape editing you can overwrite but you can never insert. Once a shot is down it can't shifted around in time. You can't insert a shot in the middle of an edited program without overwriting something. This is what is meant by linear editing.
You've edited your 30 minute masterpiece. Every cut is perfect. It just needs one thing: 7 seconds of sunrise before the scene starting at the 10 minute mark. Inserting the shot means having to re-assemble the entire remaining 20 minutes. More than likely you'll decide to give up 7 seconds in a nearby shot to limit the amount of re-editing you'll have to do, or live without the shot.
When computers came along it became possible to control video tape decks and video switchers. Such a computer can be programmed with an edit decision list (EDL), which is your entire program described shot by shot referencing source tapes and in and out times for each shot. With that information the computer can automatically assemble a video from source tapes in multiple decks. If you later decide you want to insert a shot between two others, you can change your EDL as easily as you would edit something in a word processor and tell the computer to assemble the entire video again, shot by shot, from start to finish. It's automated but it's still linear.
Today, with digital video, we can easily and inexpensively import video into our computer editing systems. We can cut it up and arrange it and rearrange it as much as we want, and in realtime. It's at lot more like working with film but much faster and more powerful. These editing system have completely removed the linear editing aspect of traditional video editing and this the reason we call them non-linear editors.
+0 Meh