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OpenShot Close To Funding Final Stretch Goal: Video Editing Server
The Kickstarter project we mentioned late last month to bring open source video editor OpenShot to Mac and Windows as well as its native base of Linux has surpassed its initial funding goal, and now is just shy (just under a thousand dollars shy, at this writing) of reaching all of the items on a revamped list of stretch goals. The only goal on that list not yet funded is a tantalizing one. JonOomph writes "The lead developer has proposed a revolutionary new feature, which would allow users to offload CPU, memory, and disk cache to a local server (or multiple local servers), dramatically increasing the speed of previewing and rendering. The more servers added to the pool, the faster the video editing engine becomes (with the primary limitation being network bandwidth). If the final goal of $40k is reached in the remaining hours, this feature will be added to the next version of OpenShot."
Like all Kickstarter projects, though, there's no actual guarantee that things will come to pass as hoped; ya pays yer money, and ya takes yer chances. Update: 04/16 16:53 GMT by T : Some hours remain, but they've crossed the $40,000 line. I hope the funding is adequate to support the outlined plans.
Yeah, that feature is now free. Do chip in if you want to, but it's already "funded".
How do they handle AVCHD, can it encode? I ended up going with the paid version of Lightworks some time ago to get the ability to stick with what my camera outputs natively, and I hazily recall that part of my payment went for licensing the extra codecs including AVCHD encode licensing. Their features page says it handles AVCHD, but usually that just means decode support. I'd really love more open source video editor choices on Windows, especially since the decent paid ones are expensive. - HEX
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Actually ... it sounds like the cluster part at least is a likely possibility. Hopefully it wouldn't actually require Beowulf design specifically ...
wrt rPi, guess that depends how far all this cross-platformocity stretches. Would be cool to click a "All machines in the house, including extra cycles on my phone" button.
Still waiting for the OpenShit goatse editor!
It's open source. You could add the button. Of course, it might not do anything, but you can add the button.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Almost nobody does real 'Beowulf' style clusters anymore, if you use a very precise definition, but in the broader sense this would be a compute cluster. I haven't studied the details of the proposal, but I'm not sure why this would ne revolutionary. Using a cluster for rendering video is pretty common. Burn clusters are used with Autodesk Smoke. Smoke used to be quite obscure but now that it exists on Mac it is seeing pretty wide use. From what I understand, Vegas has network rendering as well. Outside of strict 'editing' and into video comp and color, tons of people use things like Nuke and After Effects on a farm and Baselight uses a cluster. So, the idea isn't really revolutionary. It all boils down to whether or not the implementation is good or not, how it gets used, and wether or not it actually makes my life better.
Distributed processing for video editing is quite tricky. Unless you are doing a lot of fancy effects (which tends to happen in something like Smoke, but as far as I know Openshot has less in the way of professional finishing effects. Some of this would include cheesy stuff like lens flares. Most o it would be stuff like tracked stabilisation and degraining which can be quite slow) actually coming up with a video frame isn't that CPU intensive. When doing ordinary cuts only editing, you just have to seek to the frame in a video file, and decide the frame. For a proper editing format like ProRes, this is about as CPU intensive as decoding a JPEG. For interactive editing, that's pretty much it. Schlepping video frames across the network for that is a huge waste. If the remote system doesn't have the right codec installed, you are sunk. As your timeline gets more CPU intensive, you get more of a payoff for having Extra CPUs to throw at the problem over a relatively high latency and low bandwidth link. Figuring out exactly what to farm out and when is a nontrivial task and it won't be possible to come up with a system that works well for all possible use cases.
Anyhow, I wish them luck. Hopefully they come up with a feature set that matches their users needs. I may have to check out a current version. Last time I played with it, OpenShot wasn't really my cup of tea, but it is always good to see somebody getting support from the community to scratch an itch.
Awhile back I heard the BBC was going to develop some open source video (running on linux) editing tools for their own use internally and for publishing to the web. They said they were going to release them for everyone under the gpl or something similar. IIRC they were going to support HD video and the more recent codecs too. It sounded like it was going to be a very good catch all video converter/trimmer/editor program that I could replace vdub with. ...what ever came of that?
While I like my kickstarter projects, I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with the constant emails with "our funding is now at $XX".
Seriously, I can view the webpage. I don't need an update every few hours.
Worse, is the "Hey, while you've pledge to give us money, how about you also give money to X, Y, and Z"
Yeah, it's nice to help out these projects - and sometimes to know about related projects - but sometimes it feels like I've heard more about "get that little bit of extra funding" or "fund my friends" that I have about the actual projects themselves. Also haven't yet had a software-based project come to fruition.
... in terms of professionality...
It's made for amateurs... at best. Hell, I'm a noob, and only have brothers who are pros, and even I find it shocking how ridiculously lacking OpenShot is compared to, say, Premiere, Avid, etc.
It's closer to Windows Movie Maker than any of those.
Seriously, the software community as a whole should stop acting as if their users are complete retards. Because that's the damn *reason* they became the morons they are already by now *in the first place*!
My mother was a humorless fucktard religious zealot, you insensitive clod!
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