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.

Comments

AVCHD and other licensed codec support?

[Jonah Hex]

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

Re:AVCHD and other licensed codec support?

[wormo]

Do you really have your heart set on keeping the same container format, or would you be satisfied with an editing process that imports the audio and video without an extra re-encoding step (to preserve data quality)? I ask because AVCHD is *not* an extra codec, but merely a different container for H.264 video and ac3 (or rarely, uncompressed pcm) audio. You would be able to import and edit it in free video editors such as OpenShot, since ffmpeg can demux AVCHD files. After editing you'd need to export to some other format since ffmpeg doesn't create AVCHD files, but then again exporting videos to a format that more things than camcorders and expensive proprietary editors can play seems like a good idea in general ;)

Re:nice slashvertisement!

[larry bagina]

It's open source. You could add the button. Of course, it might not do anything, but you can add the button.

Re: nice slashvertisement!

[forkazoo]

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.