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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."
I make porn videos. There's something about using "Openshot" to edit them that just adds some credibility to my artistic vision.
ZOMG, it's linux.
You're supposed to submit improvements, or fork it, or cobble together your own from GPL code.
Epic n00bertry
Watch some of the screencasts in the video section of the Openshot website, it looks like it is fairly well featured with a not-too-steep learning curve.
Finally an open source project that reaches 1.0 !
Obligatory Princess Bride quote:
Oh wait... that's not it. Try again:
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
TLA overload. Since the summary is so short, couldn't the submitter or editor expand them?
This space for rent.
As usual, it's only adequate for home or Youtube videos/etc.
And its relatively easy to set your goals so that in a year there will be a version fulfilling them, warranting "1.0"
One that hath name thou can not otter
This is pretty neat, they also provide a .deb and ppa for installing. The demo video looks cool, I've never heard of this software before but it's good to see something new come out of the woodwork and do something halfway decent.
Hopefully the Ubuntu devs come around soon and agree to include Openshot in the next release instead of PiTiVi. Last time I checked, PiTiVi couldn't do transitions or any other fancy effects - all it did was cut and arrange the clips. I don't use it, but it doesn't look like it has changed in the entire year that Openshot has been being developed!
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
From my limited experience, the biggest problem with video editors on Linux is lack of stability. Cinelarra, LiVES, and Kdenlive crash so much they're not even usable. To make it worse, most of the crashes are random and unreproducible, so it's hard to submit helpful bug reports.
The way I see it, all OpenShot has to do is not crash every 10 minutes and it'll be light years ahead of the competition.
Maybe not
It looks like the author of this program spent(wasted?) a lot of time trying to use Gstreamer as the back-end for his project but basically ran into a brick wall.
If I remember correctly the developers of another Linux NLE called diva finally gave up on Gstreamer after years of struggling with it and subsequently abandoned their project altogether. Didn't the Diva developers also clash with the Gstreamer developers?
So it appears that the above developers put a lot of effort in writing Linux NLE's using Gstreamer but still ultimately failed at their attempts. Is there something inherently flawed with Gstreamer/Gnonlin? If Video software using Gnonlin as its back-end(Pitivi) can only be written by its author(Edward Hervey), Gstreamer must be too cryptic for mere mortal programmers. I wonder if anything formidable will ever come of Pitivi.
My question, has anybody on the commercial side actually solved the problem of mixing and matching any audio codec, video codec, and container format out there? Or do they usually just target a few codecs? Kino, for example, was reasonably stable on Linux if you just wanted to edit dv video.
I haven't installed it yet, but this looks better than anything out there so far. Hopefully it's stable and truly supports any format ffmpeg supports. Cinelerra has been stuck in the mud for too long (especially on file formats and titles), avidemux is too limited, as is kdenlive. If it's good, maybe I'll get off my ass and add a gentoo ebuild. I don't edit video very often, but I've always wished the tools were just a little bit better than what we've had.
you obviously weren't around in 1999.
"Is this one usable, unlike the other ones for linux?"
IMO, it already features everything that most people will ever need and it seems quite stable, too, but I prefer Kdenlive.
NLE = NonLinear Editor, MLT = Media Lovin' Toolkit, and TLA = Three Letter Acronym
Allow me to suggest Sourceforge for the truly retro experience.
Interesting, yes.. but I'm more interested in where that music for all of the demo videos came from. The credits list titles, composers, and the fact that they are Creative Commons but no links or URLs. So are they pieces composed just for the project? Or is there some place out there with lots of "atmospheric" instrumentals under Creative Commons that are suitable for videos?
First of all, I know this is a big achievement, so congratulations to the team of programmers for getting this far!
But after watching the video and seeing the screenshots, I think this project really really needs a designer that is familiar with what professional video editors want. It looks SO amateur that I wouldn't go near it.
All the transitions look really cheesy, and the titling tool looks like Corel Draw circa 1995.
This is all just my smart-ass opinion after spending 10 minutes on the website and without even downloading the thing (I use XP on this machine, purely for Sony Vegas Pro) but the fact is, that's how most people that might be interested in this product are going to judge this thing. I could be wrong, maybe their target audience is anwad1...
Mike
Yeah, I dislike computers in general for that reason -- everything makes easy/quick-to-learn vs. easy/quick-to-use tradeoffs.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could efficiently accomplish complex tasks with absolutely no learning, and hopefully a bunch of unicorns, too?
throw that question at Wikipedia for the full details but in a NLE program you can do stuff like grab a clip from 2:45 to 5:32 in a 3 hour clip without actually making a copy until you are done (and this can be down to the frame level) sort of like they used to do with the film reels but without the nasty cutting the film problem.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Does this thing support negative matchback, 3-perf or RED camera workflows? Or is it just another prosumer tinkertoy, like every other Linux media package?
Trust me when I say there is a LOT of interest in OSS alternatives (or any alternatives at all) to Avid, Final Cut Pro or Pro Tools, and a lot of money in support contracts if you were able to build the solution. But alas, Linux devs are constantly reinventing iMovie.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Windows solves that codec problem by having media codec plugins (VFW and DirectShow). Cannot understand why Linux does not have such infrastructure. Although libavcodec from FFmpeg is so awesome it almost is not necessary to have plugins.
The concept of predictability for *nix addicts seems to be somewhat out of line with what "normal" people would expect when it comes to interfaces. Clever abbreviations and long lists of options that need to be typed in (and may be referring to the first letter, or the second letter, or some synonym of the option name) just don't seem to sink in with the general population.
Windows solves that codec problem by having media codec plugins (VFW and DirectShow). Cannot understand why Linux does not have such infrastructure.
http://www.gstreamer.net/
I must be doing something wrong, I can't get Kdenlive to crash. Cinelarra did crash on me a couple of times.
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.
the export function is somewhat working now.
always didnt work to select different bitrate etc...
maybe i can edit my 1080p MTS files soon....
It's been a while, so I don't recall specifics, but Kdenlive crashed frequently for me. Not nearly as often as Jashaka or Wax 2.0 (Windows!), but enough to make me save the file religiously.
The government can't save you.
Fortunately, your view of modern Linux is a Lemming fantasy that really doesn't have much in common with reality.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> As usual, it's only adequate for home or Youtube videos/etc.
You mean for MOST NORMAL PEOPLE that aren't interested in shelling out $1000 for a video editor?
You mean all those people that those silly "I'm a Mac" ads are targeted at?
Was that supposed to be an insult or criticism of some kind?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
-- slightly off topic I have not done video editing, but I did do a full week of video recording and converting to DVD. I did everything in linux, and beat my friend who was using Windows hands down. Any windows video conversions took hours, but ffmpeg did conversions almost as fast as disk would allow. I discovered Handbrake after I did all this, so maybe Handbrake on Windows would be similar.
But does it run on Lin... Oh. never mind.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
example command line
ffmpeg -i input -acodec libfaac -ab 128kb -ac 2 -ar 48000 -vcodec libx264 -level 21 -b 640kb -coder 1 -f psp -flags +loop -trellis 2 -partitions +parti4x4+parti8x8+partp4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -g 250 -s 480x272 output.mp4
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
> Is this one usable, unlike the other ones for linux?
Ah, if I answer "Yes", you want me to imply the (unspecified) "other ones" aren't usable? And if I answer "No", what does that mean? Your question appears to be obvious flamebait, if you didn't mean it to be, you should work harder in the future to enable real discourse. A good start would be to actually list the names of the programs in question and for each one explain why you didn't think they were usable.
> That's one thing I never liked about linux, the tools are all either extremely dumbed down and
> featureless or incredibly hard to start using. I like power, but I like being able to jump right in.
Is this your standard "I am fishing for mod points" commentary on Linux? You didn't find even one tool which was both powerful and easy enough to use that you could just "jump in"? People here are posting that their grandmothers practically don't notice when they switch them over to Firefox from IE. I guess that means that you don't believe it's "a tool", or you don't think it is "powerful"?
A pity, since I would have classified "video editing" as really one niche where Linux, up until recently, was quite deficient compared to (what I've heard about) proprietary solutions on Windows and OS X. It happened by chance that LiVES reached 1.0 exactly when I needed a video editor to edit a short home video clip (less than 10 minutes long) and it was exactly what I needed (in terms of functionality).
> Additionally, is this 1.0 as good as the competition's 1.0?
No, ours goes to 1.1!
This question is even more idiotic. First of all, what program or programs are "the competition's"? Secondly, version numbers are arbitrary in that each vendor/OSS project defines totally different criteria as to what reaching the v. 1.0 goal means. One project might define it as "we have a rock-stable program which is useful for editing 98% of all home video" and another project might define it as "we feel our program is useful for simple editing tasks for production cinema".
appearance over content: the downfall of modern society.
There are really only two codecs to speak of IMO, MPEG2 (MiniDV, HDV) and H.264 (AVCHD) in and MPEG2 (DVD) and H.264 (online or BluRay) out. However, neither of these codecs are trivial to edit in their most effective form and there's a lot of optional encoding methods to cover it all.
For example MiniDV is quite easy because it got rather "dumb" frames, but both HDV and AVCHD use IPB encoding which is really nasty to edit. You can't just cut the video stream at random points, you may need frames both before and after the cut point to decode it. You can't jump to a random frame, you must find the nearest I-frame and work your way from there. That creates a lot of complexity where you must keep a whole different set of indexes than the one the user sees to get frame-accurate editing and a lot of decode logic to get only the intended frames while discarding the extras and so on.
Pro editing tools DO have this mostly sorted out, if you're trying for the "no tool is perfect, therefore the OSS tools are as good as the commercial tools" argument then it's failing. It's not that many combinations that are really useful, it's that the few most important ones are really, really hard to do right. The decoding libs have this straight, I never have a problem playing back MPEG2 or H.264. But there sure is a problem editing them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
General..? General Ripper? :-)
Die dulci fruere. Have a nice day.
This thread made me read up on video compression, and I can now articulate more precisely why my favorite video codec is Motion-JPEG - It uses 100% I-frames, which makes editing easy, and which makes fast motion scenes look better than codecs which use P and B frames. The only downside is that Motion JPEG doesn't offer the best compression, but it's still reasonably sized.
Even mplayer/mencoder, the best of the bunch imho, has many, many options that won't work together, and can produce output that itself cannot read. How the developers even manage to keep that massive jumble of libraries from bursting into flames I can't imagine.
Just because you *can* do something, it doesn't mean you *should*. Mencoder won't complain (much) if you give it mutually-incompatible options but it might produce something weird and unusable. Equally, it might produce something weird and awesome.
It reminds me of the drinks machines we used to have at a place I used to work in - you selected a drink by typing in a number, where the bit pattern of the number enabled or disabled various things in the machine. So, black coffee no sugar might be 11, fizzy orange juice might be 22, chicken soup might be 41 and so on. So logically warm fizzy orange juice (nice) would be 23, hot orange juice (awesome) would be 21 and warm fizzy black coffee (nicer than it sounds) would be 13. Of course this means that 42 gives you fizzy chicken soup, which isn't very nice at all.
You make it sound like such people aren't the last to use free software OS or tools (never mind that they would be probably still much better served after shelling out $70 for consumer version of Sony Vegas...). Besides, the plethora of free NLEs available rarely have on their webpage "remember, we suck in this, this, and this, we are adequate mostly for simple yt stuff"; often make it sound like their baby is better than it is in reality - which goes around and bites them in the ass IMHO. Amateur / indy filmmakers are the first to try something free but supposedly powerful and polished.
BTW, get on with the times. Full version of Sony Vegas which will most likely give an amateur / indy filmmaker anything one might want costs half of what you claim, in regular sale (and it's not just "video editor"). It has a nice property of being a very optimized piece of software too, so it might end up cheaper (considering that you need far lesser machine, to work comfortably).
One that hath name thou can not otter
Who do I have to suck of get my software slashvertised? Its a commercial product so I'm willing to pay also.
Start here.
I used two versions prior to 1.0; and OpenShot showed great promise. Used it on a real project even (30 second client demo), had to run through Avidemux then to get a .avi that Windows users could watch on their default XP windows media program (all ok on linux without that though).
I'll be installing 1.0 to check it out.
If everyone were like you (and most people) we'd still be sitting around the tree picking bugs out of rotten wood for sticks to eat and wiping our ass by licking it.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I am not talking about anything illogical. Two examples. (This might seem long winded, but that's the point! What should be simple is actually complex and a big minefield)
The -delay and -audio-delay options control something very basic - correcting for a fixed delay between audio and video. Unfortunately, these options only work on .avi's, not on .mpeg or matroska containers. The only way I've seen to fix the audio offset in a mpeg is to transcode to avi with the -delay option, then back to mpeg, which is ridiculous. Moreover, they don't even work right on .avi's unless you're re-encoding the video - not just the audio. This takes many, many times longer than just re-encoding the audio (-ovc copy -oac mp3lame...) which should be sufficient. If you try to re-encode just the audio (with ovc copy), with a positive -delay it runs but doesn't work; with a negative -delay it just locks up!
Second example, the lavc codec allows you to specify the number of threads for parallel encoding. But if you use -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=libx264:threads=2, it doesn't complain, it just drops every single frame, sitting there emitting errors. So there is no parallel encoding for my iPod.
Rather than high-end pro tools I'll never get to use, I was really thinking of mainstream commercial apps like Adobe Premiere, which is actually within reach, if it is good, but I haven't used it in years. What are most non-pros using these days, and how robust is it?
``Even mplayer/mencoder, the best of the bunch imho, has many, many options that won't work together, and can produce output that itself cannot read.''
Woah, there is something that mplayer cannot read?? It has worked for me on so many things, both good and horribly broken, that I half expect that, one day, I'm going to accidentally point it at the wrong file and it's still going to somehow give me the video that I wanted. Hats off to the mplayer contributors, it's truly an amazing program.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Even this reply misses the mark. No one was asking for a history of editing.
Again, what decent editing system today isn't nonlinear?
The way I see it, all OpenShot has to do is not crash every 10 minutes and it'll be light years ahead of the competition.
That's exactly the way I see it too. I'd love to quickly knock out some titles and clip some of the boring parts off a bunch of videos I've made of things like kids parties and snowball fights n'stuff, but the thought of having to swear loudly over my machine for hours on end is just too demoralising.
I'm playing with OpenShot right now. So far, so good. Sure, the tool bar icons all disappear when you re-size a window, but compared to totally crashing out that's nothing. Only been using it for about 30mins so far though, so we'll see.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Too true, and this goes for many commercial closed-source programs. I daresay that open source - or at least open standards - is actually one of the bigger reasons for the interest, certainly in the media companies.
Unfortunately, however...
But virtually none in actual development, unless you're an in-house coder.
Which they would if they were more familiar with the subject at hand.
I presume this was a generalization, but even as a generalization.. see the above. You can't just expect every Tom, Dick and Harriette coder to be familiar with established workflows in the higher-end segment of the market. What they -are- familiar with...
At the same time, those coders who are in fact familiar with the established workflows are rare - and are more than likely already hired by some of the bigger editing and VFX shops as in-house coders. Where -they- re-invent tools all the time, specific to their team and even specific to a particular project, after which code often gets abandoned (there's not as much re-use as people like to think - beyond the wealth of knowledge in the coder's head) and that's that.
There isn't really anything stopping a bunch of production companies to pool together resources - by that I do mean cold hard cash *and* hand-holding to educate the coders about what users need and why the existing tools fall short - and creating a kick-ass editing suite. Except for the lack of will, and the lack of project greenlighting from the higher-ups; after all, why would they give the competitor such a benefit? The industry is pretty cut-throat and having an advantage of your competitors is a good thing.. thus largely keeping in-house tools in-house.
That said... babysteps. Get an iMovie done and with any luck you've at least got a framework to build upon, to learn mistakes from, and to do better with in the future.
Video processing in general is a complete minefield. Even mplayer/mencoder, the best of the bunch imho, has many, many options that won't work together, and can produce output that itself cannot read. How the developers even manage to keep that massive jumble of libraries from bursting into flames I can't imagine.
If you really think about it, the fact that anything on a computer works is amazing. At a low level, magnets read and write ones and zeros on ridiculously fast rotating platters, and then are assembled into files, which then is stored in memory, which is then passed through a video card and converted into some format that can be displayed on a screen. Throw in networked computers and the potential for signal loss over long distances and the probability that something at some point in the process will fail, and the potential for failure increases exponentially. Maybe I'm alone, but I'm in awe of the fact that my computer doesn't just randomly catch fire and explode. (source)
Pro editing tools DO have this mostly sorted out, if you're trying for the "no tool is perfect, therefore the OSS tools are as good as the commercial tools" argument then it's failing. It's not that many combinations that are really useful, it's that the few most important ones are really, really hard to do right. The decoding libs have this straight, I never have a problem playing back MPEG2 or H.264. But there sure is a problem editing them.
Even with B frames off. H.264 is a total pain to edit in tools like AVIDemux. Best bet is converting to some other format first.
Don't forget about XviD. Virtually every device is fast enough to play back XviD, making it the pirate's choice. ;)
Content over appearance: the downfall of information.
Some windows users like to brag that their cheap NLE came bundled with their camera.
With MacOS, it comes bundled with the OS.
Either way, we are talking about relatively simple tools that are generally pretty cheap.
The original idiot (OP) was effectively whining that OpenShot was only suitable for the "common man". That's not a terrible thing really.
That means you can scratch another task off of the "need Windows for" list and it sounded like a Lemming was the one making the claim (as if it were some sort of insult).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If only suitable for the "common man" is the thing, the goal...then I hardly see what's the point of TFS. There is such software already. Worse, this one seems to be basically a one-man effort which was rushed towards the magical 1.0 number.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Give it another year and all three shall come to pass.
iMovie HD was decent enough, but since 08 they've dumbed it way the heck down, probably to encourage sales of FCE. FCE is pretty sophisticated for a $199 tool.
Yup... I use Sony Vegas Pro 9.0 myself. It's a great NLE, and around $500 new. But it did start out as Sonic Foundry's Vegas Pro, which didn't even do video, it was just an audio sequencer/NLE. And a damn fine one. That was the late 1990s. It took better than ten years of professional development (eg, fulltime jobs) to deliver the Vegas you can buy today. Give this guy a break! Vegas won with many users, IMHO, for one big reason: it was very, very reliable. Unlike most of the other NLEs of the day (some still exist, some long gone), it was reliable and modern. You didn't have to format media for use... it worked with pretty much any kind of audio, and once 2.0 was out, video, all on the same timeline. It worked direct.. no need to convert your media to other formats. It didn't crash constantly. Still doesn't. I have not played around with every Linux NLE, nor all that recently. But my experience is, none are all that powerful, and most were way too buggy to consider using. And they were not evolving anywhere near as fast as Vegas. There may be some "warm fuzzies" some folks get using free software, but if you have an actual video editing job to finish, for pay or for fun, you can only struggle so much with the tools you're using before the job isn't really about video anymore, but working around a flawed tool. Open source doesn't help if you lack the skills and or years necessary to fix the bugs in that tool... one of the stated advantages of FOSS, but not always a realistic one (if it were, the same reliability advantages you really do see in Linux these days would translate to applications, but it often doesn't). This seems like a good start.. if Thomas can concentrate on making this work reliably and simply (two of his stated goals), that's an accomplishment for Linux NLEs. Give it some time to get powerful. Linux and FOSS will benefit more from delivering solutions that really work as well as commercial solutions, of any kind, than of delivering unfinished science projects. No matter how cool the science.
-Dave Haynie
i've used avidemux for simple editing, and it worked great - that is, stable version. i tried trunk before that, and yeah, it did crash often. but that's why it's trunk :)
while avidemux isn't piled with features, it mostly satisfied my needs. some fancy subtitle editor built-in would be nice.
Rich
Adobe Premiere is a low-end professional application. Like Vegas, Final Cut Pro, and some versions of Avid, it's going to span the range of high-end hobbyist to low-end professional, for a price such folks can afford. With features they might need. But for regular consumers, no... you don't need Red Camera support, for example, in a program for consumers. You also find that at this level, the NLE is just one program of many the user will need. Even the fancy NLEs are often weak on audio, compositing, animation, titling, disc authoring, etc. Mainstream (eg, wide appeal to regular consumers) varies between "came with the computer or camcorder" apps, up to the lower-priced commercial software. In the former category, you have Windows Movie Maker (weak, but pretty much every Windows user has it), iMovie (not as bad, and every Mac user has it), and a bunch of cut-down "SE" or whatever versions of apps from the first category. These are often cut-down versions of the higher-end apps: Adobe Premiere Elements, Sony Vegas Studio, Final Cut Pro Express, etc... and some that just end at "Consumer", like Corel Video Studio, Magix Movie Edit Pro/Video Pro, etc. Many of these are available at several tiers of capabilities... they like to bundle an "SE" version where possible, get users to upgrade from that to the $50-$75 version, and maybe some of them upgrading to the $100+ version. I'm not sure there's much data on what's most popular or not. Adobe seems to be very good at getting their "SE" versions included in OEM deals... they blazed that trail with Adobe Photoshop Elements. Of course, most Mac users are using some version of iMovie or Final Cut, maybe using Avid at the very high end. Sony Vegas is very popular as an upgrade on Windows, but there are literally dozens of choices.
-Dave Haynie
Back in the days of analog, you had tape. Linear editing... tapes go backward and forward only, you can't jump around. At the end of those dark days, you could buy video controller software, that would manage camcorders and recording decks from a computer, and perhaps direct other things. For example, back in the early 1990s, I used Scala's MM300 and EE100 packages on an Amiga. This could control camcorders and decks via LANC, RS-485, or infrared, and as well, allow control of smart TBC and Genlock devices, and of course, mix in the Amiga graphics for titling. While you were kind of on your own for audio with this setup, it was a decent way to build up a linear edit. But once you had non-linear, you'd never want to go back.
-Dave Haynie
FCE has inexcusable technical faults though.
Comparable overall software, but without those faults, can be easily found for less than half the price of FCE. This link sums the situation nicely:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2009/04/11/stay-the-fuck-away-from-imoviefce/
One that hath name thou can not otter
I have tried them all and concur with the GPP.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... apart from RED's, supports RED camera workflows?
In any case, in the words of the director of "New Town killers" (Richard Jobson): RED workflow is a real PITA (so bad that he prefers to use Cannon DSLRs in video mode to shoot now).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The decoding libs have this straight, I never have a problem playing back MPEG2 or H.264. But there sure is a problem editing them.
There's now a library effort aimed at centralizing this "hard work" among the video editing suites, so the editors can focus on the front-end work.
No doubt this is over-simplifying, but re-inventing these wheels should hopefully soon be a solved problem in open source. (unless corporations decide they're good enough to crush at that point).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)