Lightworks Video Editor To Go Open Source

Art3x writes "EditShare will release its video editor as open source this summer. Lightworks handles high-definition media, DPX, and RED, shares projects with Final Cut Pro and Avid, and was recently used by Academy-award-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker on Shutter Island. Introduced in 1989 and bought by EditShare last year, it 'has come from over one million hours of software development,' says EditShare's James Richings. But he says releasing the source will 'generate concepts and capabilities never seen before. I expect that the Lightworks Open Source initiative will transform not only the technology, but also the opinions on what a professional editing tool can achieve.'" From the press release's description, it sounds like the "open source" phase will follow a period of free-as-in-beer downloading.

Comments

I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope it's released under a truly free license like the BSD or the MIT license. That's the only way to maximize everyone's freedom.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[h4rr4r]

Clearly not oh trollish one.
The GPL maximizes the freedom of the end users, and software exists solely to be used. It also will ensure lightworks continues to benefit from this open-sourcing. Without the GPL linux would be as unused in the enterprise as FreeBSD.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you label him a "troll"? What he says is absolutely true; the MIT and BSD licenses are basically the most-free licenses around.

Sum up the freedom if you don't believe us:

Total freedom of MIT and BSD licenses = Ability to redistribute code without changes + Ability to redistribute code with changes + Ability to not redistribute code without changes + Ability to not redistribute code with changes
Total freedom of MIT and BSD licenses = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1
Total freedom of MIT and BSD licenses = 4

Total freedom of the GPL = Ability to redistribute code without changes + Ability to redistribute code with changes + Ability to not redistribute code without changes + Ability to not redistribute code with changes
Total freedom of the GPL = 1 + 1 + 1 + 0
Total freedom of the GPL = 3

Clearly, the freedom you get with the MIT and BSD licenses exceeds that which you'd get from the GPL.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly not oh trollish one.
The GPL maximizes the freedom of the end users, and software exists solely to be used. It also will ensure lightworks continues to benefit from this open-sourcing. Without the GPL linux would be as unused in the enterprise as FreeBSD.

"In order to save the village, we had to destroy it."

In absolute terms, the GPL *remove* freedom. There's cases where giving up freedom is a good thing - for instance, by having the emotion of thirst for vengeance, you create a better negotiation position (people won't cheat you even if it wouldn't be to your advantage to punish them after you've found that you've been cheated, because you'll at that point go against your immediate advantage due to thirst for vengeance.)

  It is arguable whether the GPL gives end users the kind of freedom they want and is of value to them, and therefore arguable whether it is of benefit or not.

For instance, as a counterpoint, BSD software is much more used by end-users than GPL software: End users buy Mac OS X, which is BSD licensed software with stuff on top. They have shown a clear preference for this compared to Linux, with more people paying for Macs than use Linux for free. That's a freedom that they got from the BSD license - with just the GPL in play, the choice they wanted wouldn't exist, because the GPL had taken that freedom from them.

The 100% concrete and obvious advantage the GPL *does* give is protection of the developer from certain types of competition, and protection of the developer's emotions from the feeling of being exploited. These clearly have value.

The question end up: Is this value more or less than the value that the end users get from actually getting the software they want? That would of course depend on whether you're an end user or a developer that would get some value of out the GPL situation.

(I've written BSD licensed software that is now part of Mac OS X, and I'm happy to have Mac OS X available to use; for most purposes, it's my preferred client operating system. So I am clearly getting benefit of the code even though I can no longer modify everything on my system - and I feel I have greater benefit of this than I would have of using any of the available purely open source systems.)

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly not oh trollish one.
The GPL maximizes the freedom of the end users, and software exists solely to be used. It also will ensure lightworks continues to benefit from this open-sourcing. Without the GPL linux would be as unused in the enterprise as FreeBSD.

So Apache, PHP, sendmail, BIND, Perl, Imagemagick, OpenSSH and OpenSSL (to name a few permissive-license software projects) haven't been embraced by 'the enterprise' because they aren't GPL, right?

Not everyone has the ideology that _all_ software must be under a copyleft license. Sometimes it's about solving problems and making software better for everyone.

Taking a BSD licensed program with source and adding your own proprietary extensions doesn't make the original source code disappear, or any less free.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Perl is also under GPL!

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[raynet]

If you wanna sum up, then you should sum up the times the license is used. And in the long run GPL might come ahead as it will always keep scoring 3 points whereas BSD will score 0 points once it gets closed by some vendor.

Or instead of thinking what the license gives to the developer, maybe we should give more value on what it gives to the user. With GPL the user will always get the same rights as the developer had, with BSD they can be taken away.

Also BSD does have nasty limitations, it forces me to retain a copyright notice and other things. Public domain type of license could contain even more freedom.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me troll a bit: But, isn't the developer the user of the licenced thing, that is, the code, really? What is really licensed here, the software or the code? It seems to me that they are not the same thing. And i believe the license covers the code, not the software. I think the GPL license makes it so those things are confused.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you remove the attribution requirement from a BSD/MIT license, you effectively have public domain with an explicit disclaimer of warranty.

Attribution is important to stop lawsuits later on. What if someone claims your public domain work as their own and sues you for copying it?

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[dgatwood]

This is what date stamps and the way back machine are for.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[jedidiah]

> Why do you label him a "troll"? What he says is absolutely true; the MIT and BSD licenses are basically the most-free licenses around.

And pointless.

They could have merely put the source in the public domain if they wanted things to be a free-for-all.

The main benefit of a non Mad Max approach to Free Software is that it gives more developers a better incentive to contribute as they can be sure that their contributions won't be gobbled up by some company and then used against them. People like to forget that this is why the GPL came about in the first place. RMS didn't just decided to go on an ideological tear. His own contributors gave him grief when they found out that their work had been commercialized without their knowledge.

The GPL is a result of a failure of more open licensing.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the "number" of freedoms define the amount of freedom?

Example, two cities, one with complete freedom to do what you want, the other with only one rule: "you are not free to limit other people's freedom".

> Clearly, the freedom you get with the MIT and BSD licenses exceeds that which you'd get from the GPL.

Clearly the freedoms in the first city exceeds by 1 the freedoms in the second city. But in the first city you risk waking up and find your neighbour decided to build a wall around your house so you will have to pay him to get in and out AND IT'S TOTALLY LEGAL.

No rules enforce the "stronger wins" rule, and all the philosophical or trollish blabbering in this world won't change that.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[aristotle-dude]

Clearly not oh trollish one. The GPL maximizes the freedom of the end users, and software exists solely to be used. It also will ensure lightworks continues to benefit from this open-sourcing. Without the GPL linux would be as unused in the enterprise as FreeBSD.

I don't know how I will modded but GPL is "NOT" for end users. It does not affect end users one bit. End users do not compile or care to compile code.

If you are contributing to the codebase then you are no longer wearing the "end user" hat but a "contributing developer" hat.

BSD and MIT license grant more rights to third party developers. Full stop. GPL places some restrictions on release of binaries from code modifications which require publishing of code changes if a binary is released to the general public. Full Stop. Let's stop trying redefine terms like "freedom" and just spell out the differences.

GPL takes the approach of enforcement of rules if you want to play while BSD relies on good will and a desire to co-operate. One requires coercion and the other is completely voluntary.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[dfghjk]

"...they can be sure that their contributions won't be gobbled up by some company and then used against them."

How so? Used against them in what way?

"His own contributors gave him grief when they found out that their work had been commercialized without their knowledge."

I won't be looking to you for any history lessons. ;)

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Jurily]

Clearly, the freedom you get with the MIT and BSD licenses exceeds that which you'd get from the GPL.

It's not a different amount of freedom, it's a different quality, with different goals. BSD is "I want everyone to use this". GPL is "I want everyone to get the updates". We can argue about which one is better all day, but unless you understand both philosophies, it's pointless.

BSD takes into account the fact that all software can be better by using known good code. GPL takes into account the fact that writing good software is not about the code but the process that leads to the code.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Traze]

Excellent. This is how I understood each license to be.

Sad it took this long to get a good explanation.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[spirit of reason]

Putting aside your whining about being unable to monetize your changes to someone else's code, I think you can expect a relatively permissive license. In TFA, EditShare mentions they intend to let developers sell plug-ins and such. While some device drivers demonstrate you can make binary blobs interact with GPL code, I imagine it would make things much simpler if they stuck with a BSD or MIT license.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[spirit of reason]

> Why do you label him a "troll"? What he says is absolutely true; the MIT and BSD licenses are basically the most-free licenses around.

And pointless.

They aren't entirely pointless. They force new developers to give credit to those that came before. I figure this is what a university is most interested in (i.e. their reputation).

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[dangitman]

The GPL maximizes the freedom of the end users, and software exists solely to be used.

Not true. Software also exists as an asset to be profited from. For example, if you owned IP right to Photoshop, is would be useful to you as an income generator, even if you never actually used Photoshop in your entire life.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[pydev]

The BSD and MIT licenses don't maximize the freedoms of the people who actually count: the original software developers and the end users. In particular, as an end user, I don't have the freedom to inspect, modify, and redistribute the code for the software I use. In return, you grant some other people the freedom to make money of software they didn't develop.

Your argument is like saying that striking laws against murder and theft from the books grants people more freedom. But that impinges my freedom to live free from harm. Or, if you persist in abusing the term "freedom", then one simply has to say: your kind of freedom is not desirable.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[pydev]

So Apache, PHP, sendmail, BIND, Perl, Imagemagick, OpenSSH and OpenSSL (to name a few permissive-license software projects) haven't been embraced by 'the enterprise' because they aren't GPL, right?

Despite their popularity, those are really lousy pieces of software: a pain to configure, inefficient, obscure. Perhaps that's related to their license: companies just made their internal improvements and have had no incentive to contribute to them.

Taking a BSD licensed program with source and adding your own proprietary extensions doesn't make the original source code disappear, or any less free.

What good is the original software if you can't run it anywhere? Look at XBox, iPhone OS, Zune, PS3: all of those include BSD-licensed software, but those companies are using it to kill software development. If the current trend continues, it won't matter if you still have your outdated BSD code sitting on an old disk somewhere, these companies will have used it to transform the computing world into their own walled gardens, and they used your code to lower their costs for doing it.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to equate closed-source software with murder.

Fact is, normal people are happy using proprietary software when it's a better tool for the job. Is freedom of choice not also freedom?

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Johann Lau]

nah.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to equate closed-source software with murder.

Only a complete idiot would read that into that analogy.

Fact is, normal people are happy using proprietary software when it's a better tool for the job. Is freedom of choice not also freedom?

More idiocy. It's not even worth responding to that drivel. Apparently, you BSD zealots have really run out of arguments.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[Anonymous Coward]

What he says is absolutely true; the MIT and BSD licenses are basically the most-free licenses around.

From whose perspective exactly? Because as far as I'm concerned there are too many parties involved to toss words like "freedom" around willy nilly. Freedom for the developer? Freedom for the end user? Freedom for the software?

The way I see it:

Proprietary: ultimate freedom for the developer
BSD/MIT/Public domain: freedom for the software
GPL: freedom for the user

So what license to choose depends on whose freedom you value the most. Since I'm more often an end-user then a developer, I rather like GPL'd software. For me the GPL guarantees my freedom to tinker, which your precious BSD license doesn't.

Full disclosure: I run OpenBSD on my routers, FreeBSD on my servers, and Linux on my appliances: No gpl firmware? No sale.

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[drinkypoo]

Clearly not oh trollish one. The GPL maximizes the freedom of the end users, and software exists solely to be used. It also will ensure lightworks continues to benefit from this open-sourcing. Without the GPL linux would be as unused in the enterprise as FreeBSD.

I don't know how I will modded but GPL is "NOT" for end users. It does not affect end users one bit. End users do not compile or care to compile code.

Unfortunately, there is no (-1, Wrong) moderation. The GPL is for protection of users. It gives the users the right to receive, modify, and redistribute the code. You can see it is for protection of users because it gives these rights only to the users, i.e. the recipients of the binary code. As a programmer who is not the user, you are not entitled to receive the code from the distributor, because they did not distribute the binary to you.

If you are contributing to the codebase then you are no longer wearing the "end user" hat but a "contributing developer" hat.

This is provably false. You are, rather, wearing two hats at once.

BSD and MIT license grant more rights to third party developers. Full stop.

Artistic and similar licenses grant rights to everyone, while GPL grants rights to users. Full stop. It's right there in the licenses. By default works are covered by copyright. Artistic licenses say anyone can do as they like but you must give credit. GPL says recipients of the program can do as they like. The source code is considered to be the program as well (as it should be) so recipients of the source are granted the same rights as recipients of the binary. Except, of course, clauses about providing source don't apply, since there's no source to the source.

GPL takes the approach of enforcement of rules if you want to play while BSD relies on good will and a desire to co-operate.

False. Both are powered by copyright, and thus both depend on the enforcement of rules.

One requires coercion and the other is completely voluntary.

Both are completely voluntary. Nobody is forcing you to use either license when you distribute software you have written. BSD and GPL licenses only grant rights! They take nothing away. One license, however, provably provides more freedom for end users, and that license is the GPL, because it requires distributors of binaries to provide machine-readable sources as well. Remember, the GPL came from the desire to modify a printer driver. We're talking about an end-user here. GPL reduces the rights of the author (rights under copyright law) but increases the rights of the end user. Full stop.</snarky>

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[aristotle-dude]

Clearly not oh trollish one. The GPL maximizes the freedom of the end users, and software exists solely to be used. It also will ensure lightworks continues to benefit from this open-sourcing. Without the GPL linux would be as unused in the enterprise as FreeBSD.

I don't know how I will modded but GPL is "NOT" for end users. It does not affect end users one bit. End users do not compile or care to compile code.

Unfortunately, there is no (-1, Wrong) moderation. The GPL is for protection of users. It gives the users the right to receive, modify, and redistribute the code. You can see it is for protection of users because it gives these rights only to the users, i.e. the recipients of the binary code. As a programmer who is not the user, you are not entitled to receive the code from the distributor, because they did not distribute the binary to you.

Fortunately for you, there is no such modification. Users have no interest to receive, modify and redistribute code. Interested third party developers however do. As long as the GPL community continues to confuse users with developers, GNU desktop environments will continue to languish with poor end user support and uptake by the general public. It does not matter if something is "free", people are not willing to spend their time in exchange for "free" products anymore.

If you are contributing to the codebase then you are no longer wearing the "end user" hat but a "contributing developer" hat.

This is provably false. You are, rather, wearing two hats at once.

Yet again, you do not understand the distinction between the general public user community and developers. Developers are willing to roll up their sleeves to fix bugs while end users want a product that works and sufficient documentation to explain how the software work in the event that the UI is non-obvious.

BSD and MIT license grant more rights to third party developers. Full stop.

Artistic and similar licenses grant rights to everyone, while GPL grants rights to users. Full stop. It's right there in the licenses. By default works are covered by copyright. Artistic licenses say anyone can do as they like but you must give credit. GPL says recipients of the program can do as they like. The source code is considered to be the program as well (as it should be) so recipients of the source are granted the same rights as recipients of the binary. Except, of course, clauses about providing source don't apply, since there's no source to the source.

This is patently false. USERS do not receive the program in any other form than a compiled binary. Even if you were to include a source directory wastefully in the same DMG as the binary, users will install the binary and throw away the DMG not bothering to look at it. The GPL does not grant or bind the end user to anything. It is not an EULA (End USER Licence Agreement).

GPL takes the approach of enforcement of rules if you want to play while BSD relies on good will and a desire to co-operate.

False. Both are powered by copyright, and thus both depend on the enforcement of rules.

Copyright is not affected by either license. What is your point? You still maintain the copyright to all of the code that you write regardless of license. Some projects require rights assignment (GNU for example) before the code is accepted into the repository but that is outside of license terms.

One requires coercion and the other is completely voluntary.

Both are completely voluntary. Nobody is forcing you to use either license when you distribute software you have written. BSD and GPL licenses only grant rights! They take nothing away. One license, however, provably provides mo

Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses.

[drinkypoo]

Fortunately for you, there is no such modification. Users have no interest to receive, modify and redistribute code.

Please visit The Free Software Definition and read. Just read. Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms: (four freedoms are enumerated, see link) A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Need more?

The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the user's purpose that matters, not the developer's purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.

--FSF, 2010/03/30 05:22:50

In short, you do not know what you are talking about, and should desist blathering nonsense immediately. The GPL was explicitly created to protect the interests of the user. If that user is not a programmer, then they are going to receive less benefit than if they were. On the other hand, many people who are not programmers are able to derive benefits from the GPL beyond being clearly permitted to redistribute products they have purchased as is already covered by first sale law; for example, you can download OpenWRT or DD-WRT for your Linksys/Cisco router because of the influence of the GPL. See, one programmer can produce code that many people can execute. And by extension, with the benefits of Free Software, the users will have the right to do so.

The viral nature of the GPL is a major stumbling block for companies

...which only want to take, and never give. We don't need them. Over time even Microsoft has been releasing source code of its own volition. IBM has gone from one of the most closed companies on the planet to one of the champions of Open Source and even Free Software. Entire corporations are profitably operating on the basis of developing FoSS.

Great something

[ooshna]

People can use instead of their stolen Adobe Premiere programs.

Re:Great something

[rwv]

I think you're joking, but the open source video editing tools that I've used have all had extremely clunky interfaces. I'm no pro, but I've edited a 90 minute amateur film, so if I can't figure out how to import and splice clips in less than 30 minutes of picking up a copy of your video editing software, I conclude that the software is no good. It's been about two years since I've seriously looked for something, but in 2008 the state-of-the-art for open source video editing wasn't in good shape.

Re:Great something

[causality]

People can use instead of their stolen Adobe Premiere programs.

Especially now that a free alternative is available, there will be no excuse for pirating commercial software. I for one would rather not add legitimacy to the copyright interests' constant claims that piracy is the cause of all of their problems. Every time someone advocates or excuses piracy, they feel vindicated and they don't deserve that. For that reason, I have not and will not pirate Adobe Premiere or any similar commercial software and strongly recommend that no one else does this either.

I realize that this program may or may not suit your individual needs as well as something like Adobe Premiere. That would really be a separate subject, but I will say this much: there's a bit more at stake here than whether you have a super-deluxe video editor. I for one would happily do without a few extra features knowing that I won't be fueling the insanity that keeps coming from the monied interests desiring stronger copyright laws.

Re:Great something

[copponex]

Psshh. Have you ever tried to edit AVCHD in Premiere? It's like dragging an anvil through frozen molasses.

We're all pirating Final Cut on our Hackintoshes. Duhhhhh...

Re:Great something

[ZaphDingbat]

I agree completely, which is why I'm actually in the middle of writing one for Linux (+ maybe other OS's). A lot of work.

If anyone's interested, I'm working on a two-fold project: a video framework that works in 4:4:4 linear floating-point RGBA with OpenGL acceleration, and a video editor built on top of it, all scriptable via Python.

The framework is coming along nicely. I've just begun on the editing interface. You can see recent (but not current) framework code at: http://www.fluggo.com/redmine/projects/show/fluggo-media

I would be absolutely happy for someone to take the framework and build their own editor on top of it. I would love to provide support for that case. If anyone's interested, drop me a line at brian@fluggo.com.

Re:Great something

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Avid had a free version of its software that I found usable for my juvenile purposes. But it looks like they've ended that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avid_Free_DV

Re:Great something

[Animaether]

Unfortunately it seems your page is behind some manner of login.

Just wanted to say - awesome! Hopefully it'll be a solid foundation.. best would be see the various disparate video editing tools converge or at least play together more to make a competitive product/suite.

I'm a big supporter of The GIMP myself - I have Photoshop on another machine and I continually feel like I'm playing with a piece of software that a photographer from the 30's designed.. even despite all the new nifty tools in CS5. E.g. printing an image at a non-uniform scale. No can do. You must go through the resize image dialog. Upon which you must first enable the 'calculate new pixels' option because otherwise, of course, it's not actually resizing the image.. it's just changing its DPI. Oi. Effin. Vey.

But I do realize it's not even remotely on a level of competing with Photoshop - even in basic areas such as a proper transform tool. But progress is made and I do hope to see similar progress on the video editing end.

Re:Great something

[cupantae]

if I can't figure out how to import and splice clips in less than 30 minutes of picking up a copy of your video editing software, I conclude that the software is no good.

I have the same attitude with all products: if I can't figure it out in 30 minutes, without consulting a manual (see below), I just give up.

Incidentally, I can't read, write, swim, drive or ride a bicycle. I assume none of those things is any good.

Re:Great something

[yo_tuco]

The editor is part of the battle. The other is capturing the video off the cameras. When I select capture video in FCP, I get a list of choices a mile long.

Re:Great something

[cupantae]

Especially now that a free alternative is available, there will be no excuse for pirating commercial software.

To be fair, the only excuse people need is that they don't want to pay for it. You don't see people in poorer countries flocking to Linux - they generally just pirate XP. In any case, the lack of a free alternative shouldn't vindicate stealing by anyone's standards.

Re:Great something

[h4rr4r]

For an illiterate you made quite an insightful comment.

Re:Great something

[sznupi]

He won't know you appreciate his comment anyway...

Re:Great something

[__aasqbs9791]

No, I think it just appears that way. He's really just mashing keys, and sadly, will most likely respond to your comment with something like sajubzdfjhnzdfv nhjfdv nhdfHB Nvrwegrewuitfrhvfd bjdfvjhb kh. Although it may appear like English when it actually shows up, it really has no more connection to actual language than that.

Re:Great something

[cupantae]

Thanks. Martha reads out stories and comments. Then I dictate replies of my own.

[Please help me. He has me locked in his basement and the smell is horrific!
      - Martha.]

Re:Great something

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Incidentally, I can't read, write, swim, drive or ride a bicycle. I assume none of those things is any good.

Yes because simple splicing of video clips in the 21st Century requires just as much effort to learn as riding a bicycle, swimming, driving, writing, or walking.

Gotta love how users get blamed for lame UI's.

Re:Great something

[Anonymous Coward]

My excuse is learn the proprietary software by pirating it, and then if I have a need for it in a business case, I buy it. I've gotten 3 different employers to buy a copy of the adobe suite. Without pirating it and playing with it during college, I never would have been in a position to recommend and get it bought.

Re:Great something

[davmoo]

>>Have you ever tried to edit AVCHD in Premiere?

Actually I do it almost daily and don't have a problem.

Re:Great something

[ZaphDingbat]

Ack!! No! I've disabled the sign-in barrier.

I'm coming to this with a different perspective-- I'm actually an editor, too, and I want my editor to focus on, well, EDITING. We're getting all of these open source editors with bells and whistles, but they don't edit very well at all.

With any luck, I'll be back here in a year promoting my way of doing it.

Re:Great something

[ZaphDingbat]

That's actually something Linux does well at the moment, in my opinion. There's no fancy interface to it, true, but when I issue a dvgrab command, it gets *done*.

Re:Great something

[Anonymous Coward]

The Adobe stuff doesn't run on Linux unless you use wine, and I use wine for silly games and whatnot, but not for this. There are a few fairly high end editors already available for Linux. Cinerella is a bit of a pain, but useful, and of course there is a reasonably good video editor in blender (but you have to find it).

Re:Great something

[copponex]

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-creative-suite/476438-premiere-cs4-system-requirements-avchd-editing.html#post1512282

For AVCHD I put minimum requirements at:

i7-930 CPU, 6 GB memory, 3 SATA 7200 disks and a decent video card.

For CS5 / MPE the minimum video card is GTX-285.

More memory is better.

I edit AVCHD on a C2D 2.53 with 4GB of memory, 5400 RPM HDD, and a non-discrete video card.

Re:Great something

[dudpixel]

you learnt english in 30 minutes? It takes most of us 1-2 years!

Re:Great something

[arose]

Because there clearly aren't any things that sit between "less then 30 minutes" and writing. Would you like some sauce with the huge middle you ate?

Re:Great something

[Anonymous Coward]

Very funny once you come to remember that most OSS software (except very large projects) have poor and incomplete documentation.

Re:Great something

[dgatwood]

I have the same attitude with all products: if I can't figure it out in 30 minutes, without consulting a manual (see below), I just give up.

Incidentally, I can't read, write, swim, drive or ride a bicycle. I assume none of those things is any good.

That's not really a fair analogy. It's probably more like, "I've been driving a car for twenty years. If I get into your car and can't figure out how to turn it on, pull out of the parking place and drive somewhere within thirty minutes, I conclude that the car is no good."

Basic cut-and-splice video editing is a very simple process. In a good user interface, the actions a user must take to perform any simple and common task should be both discoverable and simple. Any software in which such functionality is difficult or undiscoverable is badly written software, period. You really should not need to read a manual for such basic usage unless the UI is unintuitive, which makes it, by definition, bad software. That's not saying that you should be able to be a power user in thirty minutes. You might not figure out every esoteric feature in thirty minutes, but you should be able to at least get most of the basics.

To go back to your bicycle example, this is like not being able to figure out how to raise the kickstand in the first thirty minutes. If you find that this is the case, something is massively wrong, and unless the user is a complete and total idiot, it's probably the UI.

Re:Great something

[Anonymous Coward]

Learning to ride a bike, swim, and drive took me less than half an hour each...

Re:Great something

[yo_tuco]

What about all those proprietary codecs in these cameras? It seems every manufacture is playing with the GOP too in HDV.

Re:Great something

[ustolemyname]

5400 RPM HDD

On the other hand, you edit video on a laptop.

Re:Great something

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha 100% true.

The sad thing is that this shows once again that the only way to have good open-source end user programs is if some company is "kind enough" to release a closed-source, commercial, conceived software. That means, it is not possible to make good open source software from the ground-up. Such as blender or openoffice and a bunch of others.

Re:Great something

[unapersson]

Pitivi is really easy to use. I was quite impressed how quickly I was able to put something together having no real experience of editing video. Think 15 minutes rather than half an hour. Diva looked promising at one point but that one seems to have died.

Re:Great something

[soliptic]

Awful, awful analogy, on just about every level, lord only knows how it is at +5 insightful.

GP said he wanted to be able to do one of the simplest, most fundamental building blocks of video editing in this software, not master the entire art of video editing (which he already knows and wishes to transfer) nor master the entire piece of software.

So it's more like knowing how to ride a bike, getting a new bike, spending 30 minutes and not being able to figure out how you even sit on the bike, and deciding that particular bike is rubbish.

Re:Great something

[Per Wigren]

To be honest, it takes most people their whole lives and they still don't fully master it. That includes Americans, Brits and others for whom it is their native language.

Re:Great something

[cupantae]

This was meant to be a joke. I don't blame any of the people who are getting pissed off at this being "insightful"!

Re:Great something

[drinkypoo]

if I can't figure out how to import and splice clips in less than 30 minutes of picking up a copy of your video editing software, I conclude that the software is no good.

I have the same attitude with all products: if I can't figure it out in 30 minutes, without consulting a manual (see below), I just give up.

In less than 15 minutes I could get up and editing video in After Effects or Premiere, and do crossfades and the like. Every so often I try to figure out how do it with a Linux video editing package like Cinelerra, and then I run into some retarded software bug or something, and I lose patience before I even find any useful documentation. With the Adobe stuff the answers are generally right there in the online help; unfortunately, only a tiny percentage of OSS has any useful included help. Most products for which such information is even available open your web browser when you ask for documentation. Great, now I'm having to change virtual desktops so I can read your badly-formatted, full-screen HTML help designed for online use... if I'm even online at the moment. I've uninstalled a lot of software upon finding out that the only documentation was some horribly incomplete online stuff.

The simple truth is that a well-designed UI lets you start getting work done right away. I had never driven a backhoe before, but the Kubota I sat on and dug with had labels for the two joysticks which move the arm. If I'd sat down on some antique CAT that expected you to have been to operator's school, it would have taken me slightly longer. Extrapolate this to something orders of magnitude more complicated than a backhoe, which has (typically) four functions, and you'll see that a lack of attention to the user interface can rapidly make a program unusable at all. And while the nipple may be the only intuitive interface, it's definitely possible to make an interface that works in a way that is easy to grasp.

Re:Great something

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same attitude with all products: if I can't figure it out in 30 minutes, without consulting a manual (see below), I just give up.

Incidentally, I can't read, write, swim, drive or ride a bicycle. I assume none of those things is any good.

That's not really a fair analogy. It's probably more like, "I've been driving a car for twenty years. If I get into your car and can't figure out how to turn it on, pull out of the parking place and drive somewhere within thirty minutes, I conclude that the car is no good."

Basic cut-and-splice video editing is a very simple process. In a good user interface, the actions a user must take to perform any simple and common task should be both discoverable and simple.

how dare you have valid expectations! this is open source, where the most technically capable and impressive software that is impossible for anyone to use is praised to be the greatest software there is!

case and point: GIMP
excuse: "it's not photoshop!" -- nobody said it was, it's just impossible to use (though it's getting better)

Re:Great something

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody said life was fair. Hey... I should put that on a Snorg T. Martha! Take a mee-mo!!

Re:Great something

[dudpixel]

dont leave us Australians off that list now...

No doubt, will equal GIMP

[Anonymous Coward]

And we all know what runaway success that GIMP is.

It's dead is what it is, that's all. Nothing like a million more to each contribute an hour to get another million hours. Yeah, baby!

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[Tetsujin]

And we all know what runaway success that GIMP is.

It works for me...

Anyway, Blender would be a better analogy - a closed-source tool that later went open-source. I bet if you tried real hard you could even find fault with Blender, somewhere...

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[fotbr]

Finding fault with Blender is* easy, and for much the same reason people find fault with GIMP -- the UI is something you either love, or absolutely despise, with very little in between.

*Referring to Blender circa 2003, so this may need to be changed to "was". The UI was bad enough at the time to make me not look back.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[sznupi]

I wonder if people will now grumble more about UI of Blender or about this Lightworks thing (seems to be fairly advanced, with operation built around hardware peripheral, so it's bound to be "weird" and "hard"...)

Still, can't wait (and you'd think /. would mostly agree)...one step closer to having everything I need under open OS.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[$RANDOMLUSER]

ALL the 3D graphics editor UIs I've seen suck - 3ds Max, Maya, Lightwave, etc., take your pick. 3D editing isn't something you dabble at. Either you take the time to learn the tool, or you don't get anything done. It's a shame, I know I'd like to dabble at it.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[NotBornYesterday]

the UI is something you either love, or absolutely despise, with very little in between.

Yeah, but that's hardly the exclusive domain of open source software; plenty of commercial apps over the years have had poor interfaces, and/or workflow, and/or functionality.

There's nothing wrong with simply learning a clunky UI, warts and all. The warts are a lot less obtrusive once you get used to them. I'm not saying there is an excuse for crappy design, I'm saying that familiarity can often make up for it.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[fotbr]

Oh, I know, although at the time Maya was much more usable *for me*. The fact they had a free (beer) version (watermarked images) was good enough since I was just doing some concept art. Now that Autodesk got their hands on it, I have no doubt they've ruined both the UI and the free version as well.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[fotbr]

Yet that doesn't excuse the fact that it is (or was, anyway -- as I said, it's been years since I've looked at Blender) valid criticism of it, either.

And yes, there IS something wrong with learning a clunky UI, IF there's a better solution available. In my case there was, and I would have been stupid to use the worse solution simply because it was open source. Then again, I try to use the best tool for the job, instead of being blinded by any ideology; if that best tool is open source, great. If not, that's fine with me too.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[ejtttje]

FWIW, Blender's interface isn't all that bad now I think. It's not necessarily "intuitive", but they have a good set of tutorials and user community so you can get up to speed. What it lacks in intuition, it makes up for in being efficient to navigate once you do know it (i.e. there's a hotkey combo for everything...)

Still, for precision/engineering work, it is lacking some power compared to a dedicated product like SolidWorks... different target audiences though, I'm probably in a rare intersection.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[digitalhermit]

God, I hope it goes the way of Gimp and Blender.

They're free, they work, and they're *good enough* for me. I.e., if I want/need something more, I'll fork out the money and buy it. I did this with *gasp* Adobe Premiere because the freely available tools were either buggy or lacked the features I needed.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[BigCatRik]

I did this with *gasp* Adobe Premiere because the freely available tools were either buggy or lacked the features I needed.

Same reason I got Sony Vegas. I had something that needed to be done. Blender was originally a professional in-house tool so its usefulness was already proven when it ventured into open source. Hopefully the same happens for Lightworks. Rik

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[socceroos]

I'm not sure when the last time you checked was - but Blender 2.5 is under heavy development at the moment - a revamped GUI is one of the major features. Also worth noting is that the GUI is written in Python and is detached from the backend Model-View style. It is highly customisable now - and the default looks and works well. You'd be happy to know that fully customizable keyboard shortcuts are also available - with presets.

The Durian team (CC movie by the Blender Institute) is a mix of the best Blender Artists working with the best Blender programmers - makes for startling progress and practical workflow.

Go have a look at a current Blender build from Graphicall.org - I think you'll be surprised. Let me know! =)

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[Anonymous Coward]

That was exactly what I thougt to. The interface for Maya is a total mess. It's been patched together over the past fifteen yearsnso it's more like learning six programs all with the same menu system. At times I wish Adobe would do the same thing with after effects and premier but Maya took me close to a year and a half to get competent with. Now I can move through it and get good results but you hit it on e head. You don't just walk into any 3D program so if your going to pick one might as well be the one that has no limitations.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[Anonymous Coward]

They've ported the UI to Qt in the latest version, so it looks a bit spiffier (no more motif era linux ui), but same fundamental interface.
Spot on with nixing the free version though.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[TheTurtlesMoves]

The new 2.5 blender will have a fully customizable UI. So all those Maya fans can have a maya like interface. Really when people say the hate the interface, what they really mean is that its not like last the 3d app i took the time to learn. And no 3d app is easy to learn.

However standardizing UI's is not a bad thing either. I just don't like the idea of standardizing and the expense of never improving things, or trying new ideas and work flows. A fully customizable UI is a good idea in that respect.

For the record, I don't know what all the fuss about Blenders UI is about. I have always found UI's in just about everything hard to get started with, but easy after a while, blender included. Intuitive does not mean what most UI standards and UI designers really think it means.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Blender is not CAD. Its a poly modeler with specific application of 3d animation in mind (more or less).

I like blender and i use it a lot. But a good fee CAD tool, i cannot find.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[DMUTPeregrine]

I actually like blender's interface, but I only started liking it once I made a key observation: Right-hand mouse, left-hand keyboard. All the time. It's not just mouse (like many other 3d programs), or just keyboard, pretty much everything uses both.

Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Google Sketchup ... any chimp can create aewsoem objects with it!

Be warned

[Anonymous Coward]

You can edit RED with the open source version, but you have to pay if you want to edit blue or green.

Re:Be warned

[Anonymous Coward]

Y U V so pessimistic?

open source pixi dust?

[ArsonSmith]

Are they going to continue to provide developers and push some form of direction?

From what I've seen the only successful OS projects are grown from scratch or 50%+ maintained by a single company.

Re:open source pixi dust?

[socceroos]

Blender would defy that statement, I'd think.

Re:open source pixi dust?

[supssa]

Nobody outside of awful amateurs uses Blender, same with GIMP. I would call neither successful as nobody would chose to use them given a budget.

Re:open source pixi dust?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, wrong. Look no further than Promotion Studios in Sydney, Australia. They make ads for huge companies and the exclusivly use blender.
 
I think you're just trolling. A quick Google search will reveal that blender Is used in many companies for all kinds of production work.

Analogy Pendant

[w0mprat]

Beer is not free, unless you brew it yourself, scam on some rich cougar, or steal it. Free as in beer is a better analogy for piracy or convincing your drunk boss he hasn't yet bought a round, despite having done so, thrice, at friday drinks.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[k3vlar]

Brewing beer isn't free. Unless you already own the equipment and ingredients, buying them can run you over $150 per batch. Then you have to count the time-consuming process of sanitizing the equipment, actually brewing beer, bottling it (hope you saved those bottles too!), and then drinking it before it expires (unless you can find some way to pasteurize it). However, if you do decide to do it, it is a very rewarding experience. Not free... but rewarding.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[Anonymous Coward]

'Free as in beer' is actually meant as 'free as in free beer'.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Re:Analogy Pendant

[uglyduckling]

Beer is free when someone gives it away. You get the liquid but not the recipe. That's the point of the analogy.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[h4rr4r]

If your beer is expiring try making a different beer. Many beers fair well with years of storage and no pasteurization.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[Anonymous Coward]

If you brew it yourself it is only cheaper, you still need something to ferment, water and a container to hold it, that is, unless you have a strain of yeast that turns breathable air(which is about the only resource which is free) into alcohol. Growing your own grain requires you to own land, preferably in a place where it rains just enough but never too much.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[NotBornYesterday]

Normally I wouldn't run way off-topic on a brewing tangent (I'll try to make a computing/FOSS analogy at the end to make it a little more relevant, but I'm not promising anything yet*), but I just got back from the LHBS, and am simply way too stoked to let the opportunity pass.

buying them can run you over $150 per batch.

Depends on your ingredients and batch size. I just picked up a 50lb sack of 2-row malt for $40US, and have another on backorder. Also picked up a couple vials of White Labs yeast at half off (no, they aren't expired). I just bought 3lbs of hops (1 x Galena, 1 x Willamette, 1 x Cascade) for $40US including shipping. Propane tank fillup was $15. I'll be brewing 10 gallon batches (sorry, 38 liters for you non-imperial types, or a little over 4 cases for those bad at unit conversion and division) at a cost of ~$40 for ingredients & consumables, or about $0.50 per pint. Compare that to $4/pint at the local pub.

Unless you already own the equipment

Right. I gave up trying to cost-justify that stuff a long time ago. No one ever really owns enough equipment anyway. There's always something else you need. It's part of the fun, actually.

Then you have to count the time-consuming process of sanitizing the equipment

Ugh. The primary reason I don't brew more often.

actually brewing beer

That's the fun part! Well, one of the fun parts, anyway.

bottling it

Corny kegs, baby. Best brewing investment ever.

then drinking it before it expires

Sufficient alcohol content/hopping levels should keep infections away, if you've sanitized properly. Of course, if you're worried about consuming it before it passes peak flavor, invite friends over for a party. I promise you, they will show. However, I tend to find the old maxim true: The homebrew is ready when it's gone.

However, if you do decide to do it, it is a very rewarding experience.

Cheers to that. I take it you brew?

* Apologia pro vita sua: People homebrew for the same reasons that people use or develop FOSS. Some people are just out to save a buck. Others feel that the mass-produced and mass-marketed products are often lacking in quality, or perhaps they feel that the niche products are often pricey and have an artificially snobby following. Some do it because they realize they can produce something equal or superior (for their tastes and purposes, at least) to commercially available alternatives. Some do it just because they love doing it, they love the process of creation. Brewers usually share their creations freely with others and simply ask for a smile and tiny bit of gratitude in return. Many are content to buy basic equipment and a set of ingredients and combine them as instructed, like someone might download and use Ubuntu without ever peeking under the hood. Or, a brewer might create and refine their own recipes then share them with the world, like a developer might write applications or drivers to suit themselves before releasing it to others who might use it or improve it.

They often take pride in personally building or tweaking their hardware, whether it is a 2 x quad core server with 32 GB RAM repurposed into a badass desktop (the fans make it sound like a Cessna taking off, but who the hell cares), or a custom-welded brewstand with 3 x 170,000btu propane burners (sounds like a jet taking off - freakin' glorious).

Commercial brewers jealously guard their recipes and processes. Homebrewers love to share insights and techniques. As a matter of fact, once you get one talking you can barely shut them up (case and point). Homebrewers believe that knowledge is power, and should be shared freely. In fact, they not only personify the free as in beer / free as in speech metaphor, they improve on it, since they are generally happy to freely provide the recipe for the beer just poured you, making a hybrid case of free as in speech and beer.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[h4rr4r]

I have some wine making supplies can I brew small batches of beer in that?
What would be a good start?
I would prefer to start with extract as I lack the equipment for all grain brewing.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[NotBornYesterday]

Sure. Basic beer brewing equipment is pretty much the same as basic wine equipment.

• 2 x 5 - 6 gallon containers & little airlocks (either plastic buckets with lids and/or glass carboys with stoppers; stoppers/lids need to be drilled for airlocks)
• rigid tube and flexible tubing for siphoning from one container to another, and into bottles.
• a hydrometer is helpful, but not strictly necessary

You will also need:

• about 50 clean & sanitized 12 oz beer bottles (pop-off, not twist-off, brown glass is best since light harms beer)
• ~2 gallon cooking pot (preferably stainless steel, aluminum is okay, enamel over steel is okay as long as there are no chips in the enamel - you do not want to expose your beer to regular steel; it will cause flavor problems)
• bottle capper (you'll probably need to buy this, a wine bottle corker generally won't do the job)

You can get prepackaged ingredient kits or order a la carte. For $30 - $45US, you should be able to get a kit that contains the following, which should be all you need to brew 5 gallons of beer:

• malt extract syrup and/or dried malt extract
• hops
• dried yeast
• muslin bag
• priming sugar
• bottle caps
• perhaps additional misc stuff
• instructions

There are homebrew books that are helpful in figuring out what to do and how to do it. In my experience, This is one of the best out there, and I highly recommend it for brewers of all levels. Fortunately, there is a huge amount of excellent info freely available on the internet. (Google, as always, is your friend)

The outdated look of hbd.org is misleading - you'd never know that it holds an excellent beer recipe development tool (click on "Spreadsheet") and recipe database.

Forums worth checking out:
http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/

Good luck to you, and enjoy!

Re:Analogy Pendant

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I thought the point of the analogy, is once a student hears the words "free Beer", he stops caring about brewing his own. ;)

Re:Analogy Pendant

[Anonymous Coward]

And someone is getting you drunk, so they are most likely out to screw you.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up, Donny.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[jtosburn]

I think the John Palmer's How to Brew Beer is the best place for a brewing newbie to start. Not only is it a great resource, but it's free online, or you can buy a dead tree version. Mosher's books are indeed very good, but not the best place to start, IMHO.

See http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html

Re:Analogy Pendant

[ckaminski]

I prefer growlers to kegs. No need to have a dispensing system, easy to transport, and easy to give away, and less of a PITA than cleaning 12 or 16oz bottles.

I have 100's of growlers in storage awaiting my next brewing exercise.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[NotBornYesterday]

All very true. OTOH, I can dispense any amount I want at a time, even if it's just a 2-oz sample. Plus, with kegs if my friends want beer, they actually have to visit me.;)

I have some nice 1-liter flip-tops with rugged carrying crates that make it easy to transport them, but I just never seem to use them much.

Re:Analogy Pendant

[NotBornYesterday]

Excellent reference. I like Palmer's stuff, and you're right, his material is probably better to start with. I just really like how Mosher is able to explain relatively complex concepts in a way that anyone can understand, and I love his graphs and charts.

1m hours software development

[Anonymous Coward]

That's 18 developers working 8hrs a day, every day for 20 years.

Re:1m hours software development

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the software has been around since 1989!

It almost makes sense :D

Companies Have Caught On To The Viral GPL Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

All the important open source commercial products are free BSD style licences:

* The OS X base OS parts

* The fastest webbrowser Chrome

* And Google's upcoming Chrome OS

* The amazing LLVM compiler tools that people are dumping that massive pile of fail GCC for

Companies now know to avoid the nightmare the GPL is.

Nothing good will probably come of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay! Yet another open source project that will likely stagnate at best, or (more likely) will end up with a million different forks due to all of the inevitable bickering about which direction development should go. The only way to prevent this would be some kind of centralized development effort, and I'm not holding my breath. Besides, if they've decided to go the open source route, EditShare has effectively acknowledged that the tool provides them little commercial value, and that in turn implies that the company more or less considers the tool to be dead.

Re:Nothing good will probably come of this

[I'm not really here]

the company more or less considers the tool to be dead.

OR... the company realizes that the benefits of crowd sourcing the application far outweigh the potential monetary gains of keeping it closed source. If the company releases it via BSD license and then develops and sells closed source plugins for the architecture, the massive adoption of the core software will springboard their new plugin products. As the developers of the software, they are best positioned to be the leader in plugin development for this project.

So, the cynical view that the application is dead completely ignores the possibility that it may simply be more profitable for them to open source it.

Re:Nothing good will probably come of this

[Colin Smith]

ditShare has effectively acknowledged that the tool provides them little commercial value, and that in turn implies that the company more or less considers the tool to be dead.

or most of their money comes from services rather than licenses.

 

Re:Nothing good will probably come of this

[sznupi]

Besides, if they've decided to go the open source route, EditShare has effectively acknowledged that the tool provides them little commercial value, and that in turn implies that the company more or less considers the tool to be dead.

I'm sure people on Slashdot can remember many technologies, operating systems or applications which, while great, didn't really have the chance to take off; or died untimely death due to factors external from the product itself.

Even if this tool can be considered "dead" commercially (as far as selling it goes), it can still have bright times ahead once freed.

Re:Nothing good will probably come of this

[bonch]

First off, people who non-sarcastically use the term "crowd sourcing" are ridiculous. Second, they'll have no position to be the "leader in plugin development" by being the developers of the software, because the software will be open source. The poster was right--releasing it for free means it had no monetary value to them, which says something about the software. If you look at the history of this thing, it's been sold to multiple companies over time which means nobody could do anything profitable with it.

Re:Nothing good will probably come of this

[Anonymous Coward]

"Stagnate at best"? Lol, you're a cheery little bugger, aren't you?

Re:Nothing good will probably come of this

[bieber]

Did you even read the press release? The parent company is going to have their developers working on it still after the code is released. I'm guessing you also haven't taken a look at the list of recent productions this editor has been used for, if you're under the impression that they "consider the tool to be dead."

Re:Nothing good will probably come of this

[brucewestfall]

Let's give this project a chance, please. I use Blender for alot of my work and have found that even though it is a difficult piece of software to become comfortable with, it is able to produce some very nice results. There are some minor little forks of Blender, but they are tailored to certain directions and/or platforms. I really don't see how Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, OpenOffice or all the other open source projects I dearly love and use regularly are stagnant or have "a million forks". I really don't feel I am voicing some vague opinion. Just consider giving open source a chance. I like it better than the closed source software I had to rely on until this new movement gained some strength and popularity. P.S. Come back in 2 years and lets see how things worked out. In the meantime, go back 2 years and see what people said about the open source software I previously mentioned.

Re:Nothing good will probably come of this

[LingNoi]

or (more likely) will end up with a million different forks due to all of the inevitable bickering about which direction development should go

As opposed to what? People simply going off and doing something else entirely? I'd rather have lots of people working on their own forks then one person working on one project.

Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid

[ev1lcanuck]

I'm really excited about this move. The first editing system I ever experienced when I was young was a Lightworks/Heavyworks system. My dad (a film editor, now director) loves the Lightworks systems due to their natural and intuitive control systems. I still have an old Lightwave controller sitting around that I've thought about hacking to work with the Avid.

Currently we work on Avid Media Composer, since it remains the only true pro-level editing software. Final Cut has it's pros but, at least to me, it's more for video editing (by which I mean not sourcing or finishing to film) and smaller projects (promos, commercials, shorts). If you want to cut a feature film - you use Avid. I have arguments with co-workers about FCP versus Avid but we usually arrive at the agreement that Avid is simply the standard to which all other systems are currently judged.

With the open sourcing of Lightworks I can only hope that the best of modern systems like Avid and FCP can be integrated with the very intuitive Lightworks way of working. At the very least, I hope it scares Avid and Apple at least enough to make them fix some of the problems that currently exist with their systems. More competition is always better for the end user.

Re:Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid

[sznupi]

List of features certainly looks nice (it would be even better to see some presentation; I haven't found much, too niche it seems...plus now search results are swamped with this news). For somebody who is generally fine with Sony Vegas + some nice color grading plugin, this almost looks too good to be true...

Re:Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid

[Anonymous Coward]

That is simply false.

In your opinion Avid is the standard.

Have you heard of Walter Murch?

Re:Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid

[Anonymous Coward]

When Final Cut was younger, Apple set Walter up with brand new Macs (at no cost to him) and sent Apple representatives to teach him to use it in order to sway him to Final Cut and act as the number one spokesman for using Final Cut on feature films.

Re:Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, I assure you it's 100% true. I work in the editorial department on Hollywood feature films, and it is rare (albeit not entirely unheard of) to find anything but Avid in use for editing on any feature film with even a modest budget. FCP has made some inroads in the low-budget indie world, and there are some TV series that use it, but Media Composer is still the gold standard throughout Hollywood. Walter Murch has in fact drawn the ire of many editors for his (very public) stance on Final Cut. As one editor I know put it, "Give me half a million dollars and a full time tech support team, and I'll use Final Cut too."

Personally, having worked with both, I think they both suck, but Final Cut sucks more. Final Cut would be okay to cut a half-hour series with, but it doesn't scale very well. I've worked on some low-budget features that have tried to save money by going with Final Cut, and every time that choice has been bitterly regretted by the end of the project. Avid has its own problems too. Mainly, they both feel like they're stuck in the 90s. What the post-production world needs is a modern editing system. One designed from the ground up to work with different formats of high-bitrate video and share projects and metadata across a network. Both Avid and Final Cut feel like those features are more or less bolted on. At least Avid has a demonstrated commitment to making editing systems. Apple seems to prefer making money hand over fist with the iPhone while leaving Final Cut to languish.

Re:Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony Vegas >= Media Composer. There's a difference between "everybody uses it" and "it's the only true pro-level editing software".

Re:Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony Vegas? Really? You're clearly not a professional.

I've worked in editorial for both Sony Pictures and Screen Gems several times. We used Avid Media Composer in a Unity storage environment with workstations running Mac OS X.

Even Sony doesn't believe in Vegas.

Re:Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid

[sznupi]

By reading some tidbits here and there about Lightworks, it seems its current owners focus somewhat on providing storage & collabaration backends. With some focus on those visible in the press release about opening Lightworks (I guess it would work really great mainly with their backends) - maybe it has a chance of becoming this modern editor that you wrote about, working good with different formats, nicely sharing projects and metadata?

What platform does this run on?

[yelvington]

I read the press release and even visited the website. I can't find ANYTHING that reveals the system requirements for this software. Is it a Mac application? Windows? Linux? If it won't run on my OS of choice, why should I care about it?

This appears to be an application that was never available in retail channels in the first place and has no market share or brand equity.

Re:What platform does this run on?

[notoriou5]

Lightworks Author 8.2 runs on Mac and PC. http://www.lightworkdesign.com/features/lightworks_82

Re:What platform does this run on?

[moonbender]

Nope, wrong Lightworks. Apparently, there's Lightworks the NLE software (now being open sourced), and Lightworks the rendering software (which you linked to).

Re:What platform does this run on?

[devent]

I have a PC. Will it run on it, too? Btw, my PC have Ubuntu Linux but since Lightwork will run on a PC it shouldn't be a problem?

Re:What platform does this run on?

[cupantae]

According to phoronix, it's available for Linux. Not sure about other platforms. Somebody on the phoronix forums remembers using it on Windows.

Re:What platform does this run on?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you say PC, what exactly do you mean? Windows? Linux? One of many other OS choices?

Re:What platform does this run on?

[SuperDre]

And that's exactly my problem too, I can't find anything on which platform it runs... But luckily if it's going opensource there's a good chance it will start appearing on more platforms (if it's only running on one).. But even if it runs on LInux, I still wonder on which distro, as I have seen too many program's like this only work for a specific distro.

Re:What platform does this run on?

[Anonymous Coward]

PC is not an operating system.

geek-bait?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the press release's description, it sounds like the "open source" phase will follow a period of free-as-in-beer downloading.

Translation:
It sounds like the "open source" hype, in combination with a free-as-in-beer download, will win massive marketshare, followed by the release of a "premium" version to capitalize on that.

Note that this works whether it's released as (netscape-style) open-source, or whether that promise fades away -- as long as everybody got their free copy, and knows that open-source is "around the corner", you can go quite a long way without a shred of code released.

Shutter Island editing was horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

and was recently used by Academy-award-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker on Shutter Island

That's funny, because I remember specifically thinking that the editing was horrible when I saw Shutter Island in the theater. If anything such a claim makes me wary of using this software. Although I suppose you can't blame bad editing on the software, but rather on the people using the software.

Sure beats what I've been using

[gman003]

For the past few years, all my video splicing has been done with the mediocre editor built into Blender. Which works well enough for a feature built into a 3D modeling/rendering program, but is far less usable and efficient than any dedicated one.

Re:Sure beats what I've been using

[icebraining]

I use ffmpeg "-ss" and "-t" options to splice videos, you insensitive clod!

Re:Sure beats what I've been using

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I find its a great tool for short simple work. But longer clips and its all over.

Two things I noticed

[bomanbot]

Maybe thats just me, but does anyone see any system requirements on anywhere? I read the press release, looked all over the company website and still could not find anything even remotely looking like system requirements anywhere.

I would guess that there is a Windows version and since it seems to integrate with Final Cut Pro, a Mac version seems likely as well, but there is no way to be sure and strangely, I could not find anything.

Also, it seems that Lightworks was only recently (August 2009) acquired by EditShare. Making it OpenSource now could mean that EditShare maybe was not able or willing to continue developing, selling and supporting the program and now tries to salvage something by open-sourcing it, hoping the community will pick up the slack.

Re:Two things I noticed

[euxneks]

Also, it seems that Lightworks was only recently (August 2009) acquired by EditShare. Making it OpenSource now could mean that EditShare maybe was not able or willing to continue developing, selling and supporting the program and now tries to salvage something by open-sourcing it, hoping the community will pick up the slack.

That's not necessarily a bad thing though, look at blender :) That's taken off like fireweed!

Re:Two things I noticed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's high-end video editing software. The system requirements are always 'more'. If you have to ask whether your computer can run it the answer is no. Considering that the summery talks about HD and Red video I wouldn't consider anything less than quad core with 4Gb RAM. If you are serious you would be looking more like 16Gb RAM, two or three 23"+ widescreens and a couple Tb of RAID drives for storage.

If any of this is surprising then you are not working at the level where software like this is necessary.

Re:Two things I noticed

[brianc]

Maybe thats just me, but does anyone see any system requirements on anywhere? I read the press release, looked all over the company website and still could not find anything even remotely looking like system requirements anywhere.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster to run this!

Re:Two things I noticed

[jedidiah]

If any of that is surprising then you aren't even CONSUMING this sort of material.

Nevermind creating it.

Re:Two things I noticed

[Rich0]

I dunno - there is a real niche for some half-decent FOSS video editing software that works on lower-end hardware. I know a high-schooler who wants to get into video editing but he has a very old PC. It runs ancient versions of Pinnacle moderately well, but anything new just won't work. The problem is that the old software lacks a lot of features - and I'm talking about stuff like better support for DVDs, and codecs - nothing that should require more CPU/RAM.

He just got a camera that records to mpeg-2 and not DV, and now he's pretty much up the creek since no software that supports this will work on his PC. However, his parents aren't going to spend $2500 on a brand new PC if this is still just a hobby for him.

There is no reason you can't do video on lower-end systems - you just can't do it in full-resolution/quality at full frame rate. Just scale it all down to 320x200 or something and it should work fine...

Re:Two things I noticed

[Skapare]

That depends on what level of editing you want to do, and what kind of video ingest you have. If you work in uncompressed HD, forget the low end hardware ... you'll need a $20,000 box and a screaming monster RAID array. If you work in compressed SD, the possibilities are very real. In between will likely be possible to some degree. And it depends also on what editing capabilities you want. If just frame slicing, it should be easy and fast. If you want some video image morphing, expect some long rendering times. YMMV depending on what you have in computer hardware, video hardware, and what this software (I've never used it) can do.

Re:Depends...

[annodomini]

Dude, get over yourself. Yeah, C and C++ are not ideal in every way; but no language is. They are still quite useful. There is a lot of good software out there written in them (such as Firefox itself).

If you really want to contribute, and help fix said security issues, it would behoove you to learn them. Otherwise, I'd recommend finding a project written in the language of your choice, and contributing to that. It doesn't make that much sense to complain about a project not being in your favorite language and asking for an extension mechanism using another language just so you can contribute.

Good troll!

[Colin Smith]

I'll push it a little further by saying. What really makes Richard Stallman the true genius behind Linux is not his code or gcc, but the little bit of virus he put in every GPL.

How's that sound?
 

Re:Good troll!

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of just discussing the issue at hand, why do you GPL advocates always resort of ad hominem attacks and other logical fallacies?

Can't we please just get back to discussing how the BSD and MIT licenses promote freedom for all, while the GPL stifles it?

You need to stop calling people "trolls", you need to stop making exaggerations, and you need to try to partake in this discussion as if you were a mature, educated adult.

Re:Good troll!

[bonch]

Richard Stallman isn't the genius being Linux. He resented Linux and insisted on calling it "GNU/Linux" to ride its coattails when the HURD failed. GCC is terrible and is being replaced by a faster, superior, BSD-licensed compiler--Clang/LLVM. The viral nature of the GPL has been disastrous, especially version 3.

Stallman is the ultimate example of blind religious fervor overriding common sense. He also eats his toe jam in public. Look up the video.

Re:Good troll!

[HBI]

Advocating giving every piece of good OSS to Microsoft for free IS trolling. Who the hell wants to write code to benefit Redmond for free? I doubt many Microsofties themselves would do that.

Re:Good troll!

[h4rr4r]

Sure, the BSD license promotes the freedom of companies to close up code you wrote and it sell back to you. They can then use it in a computer that you are not even allowed to run your own apps on or develop for if you do not use their blessed environment.

That's some great freedom if you are a billionaire, for the rest of us not so much.

Re:Good troll!

[Anonymous Coward]

The viral nature of the GPL has been disastrous

Disastrous for what? Oh, for companies that want to use other people's work without giving anything in return.

World's smallest violin, right here -> .

I'd play "My Heart Bleeds for You" on it, but you'd have to pay me up front first, you look like the shifty sort who thinks they ought to get something for nothing.

Re:Good troll!

[dgatwood]

Sure, the BSD license promotes the freedom of companies to close up code you wrote and it sell back to you.

Ah, but in practice, most of the time, either A. the company keeps it open source anyway (e.g. Apple with most of the lower half of Mac OS X), B. the company builds a closed source version but regularly pushes fixes upstream, or C. the software is in a device where changing out parts of the software is well beyond the skills of a typical user (e.g. your microwave oven). Most of the exceptions to that statement never gained any real traction in the marketplace.

Sure, you can point out a few prominent exceptions, e.g. Microsoft using BSD's TCP/IP stack in Windows, but do you honestly expect anybody to believe that anyone would have been served by the original stack being under the GPL? Microsoft would never have made their kernel open source anyway, so they either would have rewritten it or worse, developed a competing network standard. Either of those would have resulted in further fragmentation of the market, more bugs that users have to suffer through, and in general a worse perception of computing by the public as a whole. The only way you could reasonably argue that anyone would have benefitted from this is if you honestly believe that Windows (already the dominant platform by this time) would have lost its dominance due to Linux having a better TCP/IP stack sooner. That's a pretty big stretch of the imagination, to say the least.

Re:Good troll!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd much prefer it if Microsoft used nothing but BSD software in their products! Then their products wouldn't be so full of security holes and other bugs.

Re:Good troll!

[h4rr4r]

A. So they get free stuff you get nothing new
B. how nice of them, too bad they can stop at anytime
C. Perhaps I want to mod my microwave

I think MS will take whatever they can get for free and never give anything back. They would have eventually written their own stack, nothing would have changed except they would not have gotten a free ride.

Re:Good troll!

[dgatwood]

You're probably right about MS. And they would be a few million dollars poorer, which sounds like a lot until you realize that it's on the order of 0.001% of their market cap.... In short, nothing would be substantially different in the grand scheme of things. It's neither a gain nor a loss. However when you factor in all the other companies that used the same stack and *did* push changes back, it's pretty clear that the BSD license was a net win.

Corporations for the most part don't care about open source software. If they can use it, great, they'll use it. If they can't, they'll rewrite it. The only real difference as far as open source projects are concerned is that if they are able to use the open source code, there's at least some possibility that they will care enough to give back improvements that everyone benefits from, whereas if they have to rewrite it, there's no possibility of that happening.

Re:Depends...

[gyrogeerloose]

I refuse to ever use C/C++, because I consider its outdated design [...] and its inelegance and programming inefficiency to be a pain to my brain.

No problem. All Lightwave development is done in LOGO. Just tell the turtle what you want it to do.

Re:Depends...

[h4rr4r]

But I refuse to ever use C/C++, because I consider its outdated design to be the cause of pretty much every security exploit out there, and its inelegance and programming inefficiency to be a pain to my brain.

I bet you were told you were special when you were a kid right?

Re:Companies Have Caught On To The Viral GPL Garba

[h4rr4r]

All the important open source commercial products are free BSD style licences

And that is your list of important products?
HAHA

OSX- used by no one in the enterprise and pointless as a server OS

Chrome: a browser with no marketshare, even opera is more popular

Chrome OS: will be linux, meaning GPL kernel!

LLVM: nice idea, but no one is using it.

Re:Companies Have Caught On To The Viral GPL Garba

[dgatwood]

Chrome is also a bad example. It's based on WebKit, and portions of WebKit are under the LGPL. I doubt they've stripped out and rewritten all of WebCore.

Re:Companies Have Caught On To The Viral GPL Garba

[K. S. Kyosuke]

LLVM: nice idea, but no one is using it.

Or, nice idea, implemented in a terrible language. Could have been much nicer if it had been designed along the lines of COLA/OMeta. And - that's a wild guess, though - much, much shorter.

The entire complier tech world is laughing at you

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see.

On the one hand you have LLVM taking over the compiler tech world like no other project in the history of the field.

On the other hand you have some random idiot on Slashdot...

Go back to that laughable turd GCC dummy.

Where's the meat?

[cheesybagel]

I only found a press release written in marketingdroidese claiming a lot of things, mostly vapid. However I found no publicly available source code. Nor even what the released source code will actually be, since the press release is so vacuous you cannot understand which parts of the application will be open source, or if it is the whole application. Nor even in which license the source code is supposed to be released in.

Re:Where's the meat?

[ianare]

They're keeping what they reveal now to be as vague as possible so they will be able to change it later on.

Right now, they just want to judge how much of a reaction they get from this. The game they're playing is that the community will give them more than their competition can take, in terms of marketshare (expect a 'premium' or 'professional' version) and in software advances contributed.

So if a lot of developers sign up, I would expect they'll be more permissive in their licensing. If not many are interested, they'll most likely be more restrictive, or even change their minds on the whole thing.

Re:Companies Have Caught On To The Viral GPL Garba

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, nice idea, implemented in a terrible language.

pcc looks promising!

Writing any compiler in C++ is kind of like using a seized up jackhammer with one hand to thread a needle, except you'll be happier with the results from the analogy.

What's the appeal of a supercompiler anyway? Systems languages that can't be self hosted aren't complete systems languages.

Re:No Wonder GPL Software Is Such Garbage

[h4rr4r]

Oh no an internet toughguy!
An anonymous one at that, what a surprise.

Re:Depends...

[h4rr4r]

Your comment is beyond awesome. That comment makes the FSM smile upon you and will get you closer to an eternity spent in the shadow of the beer volcano and within walking distance of the stripper factory.

Re:No Wonder GPL Software Is Such Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

You got owned.

Re:Depends...

[Anonymous Coward]

That would i

Re:No Wonder GPL Software Is Such Garbage

[__aasqbs9791]

Well, you have to admit it's hard being a touch guy when you're 5'2, weigh 80 lbs and are 12 years old.

Re:Depends...

[gyrogeerloose]

Thanks. May you be touched by his noodly appendage.

Re:The entire complier tech world is laughing at y

[h4rr4r]

On the one hand you have LLVM taking over the compiler tech world like no other project in the history of the field.

Making shit up or you got a citation for that?
Even the projects built with llvm page shows nothing all that interesting.

Re:The entire complier tech world is laughing at y

[K. S. Kyosuke]

On the one hand you have LLVM taking over the compiler tech world like no other project in the history of the field.

Uhhm, sorry? I see no such thing. The field of programming language compilers is diverse and LLVM most certainly does not fit all scenarios, and perhaps not even all languages. (One of my friends tried to implement some sort of Scheme-like system language, he had rather strict requirements and he found the LLVM IR model deficient - tail calls, continuation, type system...I can't remember now what exactly was the problem, it was a few years ago - but perhaps they have extended it by now.)

More info

[ianare]

Looks like you'll have to register to get more info :

http://www.editshare.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=208

Hilarious!

[wyoung76]

If only I had mod points, you'd definitely get some

Re:Orwellian Style GNU Doublespeak

[jedidiah]

> What a bunch of retards.
>
> Do you GNU idiots actually think anyone is falling for your lame attempts at word games to cover up your shitty viral license?

I was thinking the exact same thing about you lot that have a notion of "freedom" that neglects human nature.

Re:Companies Have Caught On To The Viral GPL Garba

[jedidiah]

OSX is a bad example because you need to use highly proprietary software to get anything out of it.

It's not like anyone uses OSX for the BSD.

BSD just enabled Apple to get the underside of the OS for free.

Bring the iphone/ipad into the picture and it only gets worse.

Re:Depends...

[Hurricane78]

FYI. I consider Haskell my favorite language. So coming up to an elitist like me, by using elitism... not such a great idea... ;))

NOT open source. They're just open sourcing the UI

[sanermind]

A departure from standard 3rd-party developer programs that limit access, the Lightworks Open Source platform offers an unprecedented gateway into the NLE’s core engine, enabling a wide-range of creative developers to implement forward-thinking features and workflows.
*
*
*
...Lightworks Open Source offers a highly collaborative development environment based on powerful and feature-rich underlying technology,

It's entirely clear from the press release that they have no intention whatsoever of opensourcing the "feature rich underlying technology" of the "NLE 's core engine".

This is the same sort of thing that Xara tried to pull... using the open source community to add additional power and functionality that all ultimately still depended on a proprietary close-source rendering engine. That went well!

Re:Companies Have Caught On To The Viral GPL Garba

[Anonymous Coward]

OSX- used by no one in the enterprise and pointless as a server OS

But has more than 5x the overall share of Linux, and makes up a disproportionately large percentage of the pro media market.

Chrome: a browser with no marketshare, even opera is more popular

I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but Opera isn't more popular than Chrome. A more sensible argument would have been pointing out the the rendering engine is GPL.

LLVM: nice idea, but no one is using it.

Apple is heading the development of LLVM/CLANG and is very much using it, the free BSDs are all working to move over to it (FreeBSD is about 80-90% there last I heard). Others will follow suite.

Though I could say the same about what it's aiming to replace; nobody really uses GCC either, the BSDs are all moving to PCC/LLVM, Apple is moving to LLVM, MSVC sees the most use on Windows systems, Sun Studio sees the most use on Sparc systems, ICC on Itanic, GCC is only really significant on Linux, and less than 1% of the market uses that.

I'd like to throw in that the most deployed Unix system (SFU/SUA) is BSD derived as well.
Apache is under the BSD-like Apache license, as are Derby, Catalina and Tomcat/Jakarta.
PHP is under the BSD-like PHP license.
PostgreSQL is under a BSD-like license.
SQLite is public domain, and thus closer to BSD than GPL.
Firefox is tri-licensed, but people like to forget about the other two licensing options.
GlassFish, the j2ee referrence implementation is under CDDL.
Mono, RoR, XWindows and Lua are MIT-licensed.

That's just off the top of my head.

Re:The entire complier tech world is laughing at y

[shutdown -p now]

One of my friends tried to implement some sort of Scheme-like system language, he had rather strict requirements and he found the LLVM IR model deficient - tail calls, continuation, type system...I can't remember now what exactly was the problem, it was a few years ago - but perhaps they have extended it by now.

"Type system" complaint doesn't make much sense, to be honest. LLVM is really just "portable assembly". Type system? It offers the basic primitive types, aggregates thereof (arrays, structs), and pointers to them. That is sufficient to build a data structure of any complexity. Any actual type system of your language would be entirely separate, and may not even trivially map to any of LLVM types - the latter are implementation details.

With respect to tail calls, LLVM has them - unlike C, and that one is actually a big deal because you really have to have tailcall support even on such a low level, because it is something that cannot be efficiently worked around (you can do it if you provide your own call stack, which is obviously not efficient).

Continuations? If we're talking about full-fledged re-invokable ones (which is what call/cc is), then you can't have them without spaghetti stack, anyway - meaning that you have to ignore whatever the platform (and therefore LLVM) provide you, and roll out your own. If it's just a rewinding facility, then LLVM has it.

To sum it up: if you can write a compiler of some language to assembly, you most assuredly can write a compiler for the same language to LLVM.

Video editing with AviSynth

[lawpoop]

I'd like to take the opportunity to plug video editing with AviSynth. No, there's no GUI and it only runs on Windows. But, if you want to take the power of scripting and programming to the world of video editing, this tool is for you.

There was at one time a project to make a version that ran cross-platform, but it ran out of steam.

Re:Video editing with AviSynth

[comm2k]

Using AviSynth for 'editing' is very very suboptimal. I love AviSynth for what it does (create wonderful stuff from crappy clips / clean up and other processing). However it is completely ill-suited as a 'editor'. Especially since everything (I know there was a plugin/fork to get directstreamcopy but it is not standard functionality) is recompressed. Lets compare that to something simple like VirtualDub. Load DV AVI clip, select in/out, select DirectStreamCopy for audio and video and save the clip. No quality loss, no recompression - 'rendering' time only limited by speed of your disk. Want to quickly insert titles? Start measuring pixels instead of just putting the title in there with a gui and your mouse.
Yes people have cut whole projects including fadei/o and dissolves with AviSynth but then again I can build a car completely out of engines too.
Why do people always recommend it for editing? It is a EXTREMELY cool piece of software for PROCESSING but I'd never torture myself for using it to edit a project.

Re:Video editing with AviSynth

[drinkypoo]

AviSynth is not a video editing tool. It's a video editing framework. Your text editor becomes the editing tool, and that is a bit retarded. However, if you merged virtualdub and avisynth into one program, say, then you'd really have something; ideally, like Dreamweaver, it would have a three-way-split view, and you could see the video preview, the GUI controls, and the script all at the same time, with changes to either code or GUI edit tools being reflected in the other view[s] in realtime. In the mean time, however, plugging AviSynth is offtopic.

Re:NOT open source. They're just open sourcing the

[Cybie]

Yeah, that's how I read it too. They're releaseing it for free (as-in-beer) with an SDK. Then they plan to make money off of it by running an "App Store" like service for the plugins.

Don't get me wrong, a no-cost video editor is a good thing. But I think Linux and/or Open Source fans are going to be dissapointed.

your equations are wrong

[pydev]

BSD license:

freedom to see, modify, and redistribute the source code of an application that I use = 0

GPL license:

freedom to see, modify, and redistribute the source code of an application that I use = 3

Clearly, the freedom I get with the GPL is bigger than the freedom I get with the BSD license.

Your so-called freedoms are the "freedom" of people who didn't contribute to the software to restrict other people from modifying and redistributing the software. Sometimes software developers grant these additional freedoms in order to achieve some other goals, but they are of no intrinsic value to the developer or the user.

By analogy, if we legalized fraud and murder, people would have more freedom, but that doesn't make legalizing fraud and murder desirable.

Re:your equations are wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, then apply the GPL to everything in life.

If you write any piece of software, you must open source it completely because it is based on prior open knowledge of programming languages and binary machine language, etc.

If you invent a revolutionary new electronic gadget, you must open source it completely because it is based on prior open knowledge, such as electricity, transistors, capacitors, etc.

The GPL utterly fails. It's the FOSS zealot's "but that's not fair" whine. It doesn't promote new products or innovation, it promotes stagnation. It teaches people that it's ok to rest on their laurels forever because "someone else will improve it and have to give me those improvements".

Re:Orwellian Style BSD Doublespeak

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you BSD idiots actually think anyone is falling for your lame attempts at word games to cover up your shitty corporatist agenda? You want companies like Microsoft, Apple, Sony, and others to profit from volunteer work while at the same time making systems more and more closed.

GPL is clear about what freedom it intends to protect: the freedom to develop and modify software.

Retards like you are the enemies of that freedom.

Re:No Wonder GPL Software Is Such Garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD based OS X has kicked the shit out of the stinking pile of fail that the GPL Linux desktop

There is some BSD software in OS X, there is also tons of GPL software. Apple wouldn't exist without it.

I think Apple fanboys fear the GPL so much because they know that if Apple couldn't rip off BSD software and other people's inventions, they'd be out of business.

Re:Companies Have Caught On To The Viral GPL Garba

[uglyduckling]

It's not like anyone uses OSX for the BSD

*cough* hello?? Loads of geeks use OSX precisely because it has BSD under the hood. I know it's fashionable to bash Apple at the moment for some reason, but wind the clock back 2 years and plenty of people were buying a MacBook so they could have the best of both worlds.

Re:Good troll, troll!

[Anonymous Coward]

What complete and utter drivel. You have no idea how many systems use BSD licensed code for the very reason that they have closed sourced it.

The license came into existence purely so that big business, and maybe development team members, could privatise the code, which had been produced in government funded educational institutions. It was a clever ruse.

Releasing bits of the code upstream while keeping the most important bits closed is just another technique to keep the dimmer members of the programming community on board and contributing.

BSD is freer in much the same way that the type of democracy they had in Germany before the war was freer - because it allowed them to vote away their democratic rights.

Re:No Wonder GPL Software Is Such Garbage

[Hognoxious]

Yoda I am, insensitive clod.

Re:No Wonder GPL Software Is Such Garbage

[packman]

"Ripping off" ??? If the BSD creators felt this way and would not approve such use, they would have used a different license... Apple does what it's allowed to do with the software. They don't want to reinvent the wheel, unlike some Redmond-based company, and are prepared to go for the best sollutions for their customers. They use/support webkit, they distribute Apache and countless other opensource applications with their OS. Want it or not - that's what they are allowed to do.

Most people here have to shut up about licenses - since 99% have never even written any code. It's the developer that decides what someone else would be able to do with his code, and that's nobody else's decision.

hi

[jennajameson15]

Great detailed information, I ll be visiting you more frequently, here is very interesting information. green world

Now where to get good hardware?

[Skapare]

So, now where can I find a good video capture and playback card, which deliver all video formats in a unified open I-frame-only compressed format (e.g. Dirac) to the software, along with the audio in perfect sync (e.g. audio chunks grouped and tagged with video frames), and also accept exactly that same stream (even if re-ordered frame by frame) on output. Compression is important to avoid having to process 250 megaBYTES of data for HD. Also, this hardware needs to have the various forms of audio/video input/output that are in common use in the marketed region, including genlocked synchronized output. For the USA this would include the SDI and HD-SDI commonly used in broadcast, as well as Firewire, HDMI and preferably also analog. And, of course, its driver needs to be full open source suitable for use on BSD and Linux. If the hardware to software interface is designed in a straight-forward simple manner, with basic commands to set modes, query detected input modes, and read/write data blocks frame by frame, there would be no secrecy needed in the driver.

Re:Depends...

[Skapare]

The difference in security of programming between the C/C++ languages and higher languages, is that in the former case, security is the responsibility of the programmer, whereas in the latter case, security gets delegated to the language framework. Not all programmers can get it right for the former. OTOH, the latter risks programmers doing something really stupid because they think their arse is covered.

Re:Orwellian Style GNU Doublespeak

[Johann Lau]

why so sore? why so stupid? doesn't it suck to play foul and still lose? just... move over already.

it may simply be more profitable to go open source

[SgtChaireBourne]

Or if they want to make sure their developers get paid, they could release it dual license GPL / proprietary. That way everyone brings something to the table: cash or code.

And, no, despite the talking points from this season's blusterings from M$partners, the project maintainer is not required to accept the code. That stands regardless of the license used, GPL, BSD or other. And regardless of the license, they are still in the best position to earn money from customization or deployment. Even if something is FOSS and easy to deploy, there are still a lot of companies that would rather pay you to set it up right the first time and walk their staff through the process. Do it in a way that they're happy about and they'll call back with more orders.

Re:Depends...

[drinkypoo]

That comment makes the FSM smile upon you and will get you closer to an eternity spent in the shadow of the beer volcano and within walking distance of the stripper factory.

WTF, don't they ship?