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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.
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.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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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.
> 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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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