Slashdot Mirror
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
Finally an open source project that reaches 1.0 !
TLA overload. Since the summary is so short, couldn't the submitter or editor expand them?
This space for rent.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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".
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