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Open Source Video Editor Pitivi Seeks Crowdfunding to Reach 1.0

Posted by timothy on from the tantalizingly-close dept.

Eloquence writes "Pitivi is perhaps the most mature, stable and actually usable open source video editor out there. They're now looking to raise funds to support the project's ongoing development. The lack of decent open source video editors has been one of the things keeping people locked into proprietary platforms, and video editing has been identified as a high priority project by the Free Software Foundation. 2014 may still not be the fabled year of the Linux desktop, but here's hoping it'll be the year of open source video editing." Work continues as well on the crowdfunded transition to cross-platform, open-source video editing with OpenShot, and developer Jonathan Thomas is presenting the work done so far at SCALE this weekend.

25 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Pitivi is such a POS by barlevg · · Score: 2

    If I were to fund the continued development of one Linux-based video authoring/editing tool it would be Cinelerra. Between that and Avidemux, all my video editing needs are completely met.

    1. Re:Pitivi is such a POS by Mathieu_Du · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Did you at least try the 0.9X series ? It has completelely and radically changed, and I'm not sure how calling it a piece of shit will help the discussion.

    2. Re:Pitivi is such a POS by ssam · · Score: 5, Informative

      While Cinelerra is very capable, it also seems to be an unmaintainable code dump. The community project can just about get it in a state that it builds, but I am not aware that they have added any features to it. IIRC the community devs though it would be better to start again from scatch, with a project called something like Luminara, but I can't find much about that now.

      On the other hand Pitivi is build on a solid base of libraries that are used widely in other peices of software. Even if pitivi were not to succede then it would have created the tools for other people to build an editor. It also provides a base of libraries for experimental editors like Nova cut.

    3. Re:Pitivi is such a POS by Mathieu_Du · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Thanks for answering more kindly. Cinelerra's development looks like it's discontinued, and Pitivi's design makes of it the most promising open source video editing application in my very humble but slightly informed opinion :)

    4. Re:Pitivi is such a POS by Raul654 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Agreed - it's a POS.

      I installed Pitivi .15.2 from from the repos. It literally took me less than 2 minutes to crash it. It died as soon as I imported an mp3 to use as audio. (NOTE: Their website says not to report .15.2 bugs. They are evidently not supporting it anymore)

      Then, following the suggestions posted here, I grabbed the latest version from source (which through trial and error, I found required adding a source repo and installing build dependencies before attempting to install from source). I configured it, built it, and tried to run it. It immediately errored out, complaining that I need to install yet more missing dependencies (GES this time). I googled the problem, saw lots of people complaing about this, and found some vague instructions on the pitivi wiki (http://wiki.pitivi.org/wiki/Building_with_GES) explaining how to install it.

      At this point, I threw in the towel.

      --


      To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
      --E.C. Stanton
  2. I'm surprised ... by Rambo+Tribble · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... Kdenlive doesn't get more love. Although you have to get newer builds to get stability, it's long had a strong feature set and very approachable interface. The video formats it works with constitute a most impressive list.

    1. Re:I'm surprised ... by fendragon · · Score: 4, Interesting
      It's getting some love here!

      I've used Avidemux for a long time, tried KDEnlive before and it was hard to understand and kept crashing - but a recent version of KDEnlive is quite different - easy to use, reasonably stable, does more than I want and will use all six cores of my CPU for rendering if I ask it to. I don't know about Pitivi, but you'd have to work very hard to convince me to throw development money at that when KDEnlive is apparently so far ahead.

      As mentioned above there's also Cinelerra. I found that hard work to understand but I suspect it's very powerful.

    2. Re:I'm surprised ... by Rambo+Tribble · · Score: 2

      I fully agree with your comments. Perhaps Kdenlive lost some potential admirers with those earlier, unstable builds. I know it was frustrating to get the editing done, only to have the software crash every time you tried to render. Hopefully people will get the word that it is now a stable, capable and accessible alternative to costly proprietary products.

    3. Re:I'm surprised ... by SuperCharlie · · Score: 2

      Wasnt Kdenlive the one where the main developer walked away and they thought he was dead for a while?

    4. Re:I'm surprised ... by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

      fedora+rpmfusion - 6'3" and manly. ;)

      I try the current build of all the linux video editors about every six months. Usually I try to import an h.264 video and edit out a couple clips and export that as my test. Almost always everything crashes. The underlying tools (ffmpeg/mencoder/gstreamer, etc.) are stable in other applications.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    5. Re:I'm surprised ... by ewhac · · Score: 2
      Gratuitous plug for my YouTube "Let's Play" playlist.

      All the videos I've compiled and uploaded to YouTube have been made using Kdenlive. I don't labor under the notion that it's perfect, but I found it much better and more accessible that anything else I tried.

      Kdenlive's most annoying bug at the moment is that the sound in the final compiled video will sometimes drift, i.e. in an hour-long video, the sound will start off in sync with the video but, by the time you get to the end, it's as much as 1.5 seconds off. This drift does not appear when playing back in the editor timeline; only in the final compiled video. I have not been able to reliably reproduce this issue for the developers, nor do I have a notion of what triggers it. Once it appears in a project, it's there and you can't get rid of it. It's possible it's an issue with MLT (the library on which Kdenlive is built) but, again, I haven't isolated the issue.

      Other than that, it's worked very well for me. Even on those occasions when it has crashed, it has never destroyed my work; just re-launch and pick up from where you left off.

      If something better came along, I would jump to it without much thought. But I haven't found it yet. I'll give 'pitivi' another look, but it looks as if installing it into my generic Debian system will be a pain (v0.92 is only available in the 'experimental' repository).

      --
      Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
  3. not a fan by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 3, Informative

    Python is not suited for every task and video editing is one of the things that should be exclusively in native code.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    1. Re:not a fan by Mathieu_Du · · Score: 5, Informative

      And that's why python is only used for laying out the user interface, and all the heavy lifting is done by GStreamer and gst-editing-services. I invite you to research that ;)

    2. Re:not a fan by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

      I agree. I used kdenlive and pitivi. The last named one simply sucked donkey balls and crashed whenever possible.

      This has been my experience as well, sadly.

      I think I'm going to go install SheepShaver, MacOS 9 and iMovie 2. That was good enough for editing home video back in the 90's and the linux desktop still has nothing half as usable. I can set up netatalk to get the video files in and out and carefully limit the firewall to that service.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    3. Re:not a fan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Where the hell did you get that idea? All performance critical code is in the media framework and codecs layer (Gstreamer for Pitivi, MLT for KDEnlive and Flowblade). Python code does things like "add clip to track","seek to frame 3452","start playback from current frame". There is zero need to to do CPU intensive tasks in Python code when programming video editors.

  4. other crowd sourcing by BradMajors · · Score: 2

    The most popular website for crowd sourcing for open source appears to be: http://www.freedomsponsors.com...

    Pitivi seems to be having better results crowd sourcing than many other open source projects.

  5. You already have Blender 3D... by MindPrison · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...which is as far as I know, one of the most stable and compatible Video Editors out there (free & open source & GPL and all that jazz). www.blender.org

    Yes yes...it's 3D software, but it has a very functional, totally unlimited video-editing suite built right in, very easy to use too...you don't need to learn how to use Blender, but you need to learn a bit about video formats, compression and such.

    --
    What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
    1. Re:You already have Blender 3D... by ssam · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think pitivi is aiming to be usable for a different set of users than blender. Pitivi lets you just drag video clips into time line without worrying about resolutions, frame rates or codecs. Achieving the same process in blender requires quite a bit more work.

      Vim and emacs are great tools, but it does not mean that we don't need gedit and kate.

  6. Resolve and LightWorks by Art3x · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There's also DaVinci Resolve and and LightWorks. Both with free Linux versions.

    DaVinci Resolve is mainly for color tweaking but since version 10 also can cut. LightWorks has been used in Hollywood a lot.

    In light of these two offerings, I'm surprised that PiTiVi is called the most mature. I haven't used any of them, though.

  7. Re:Crowdsourcing? by arielCo · · Score: 2

    Eating. Beer. Coffee. Hardware for building & testing.

    Perhaps hiring freelancers to help or not having to work freelance themselves.

    But most likely beer.

    --
    This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
  8. Very enthusiastic about that effort ! by Mathieu_Du · · Score: 5, Informative

    Disclaimer : I'm one of the Pitivi's developers, and I'm very excited about that campaign. We feel like Pitivi's technological choices (being based on GStreamer), and its large community make it the most promising open source video editing application out there ! I encourage you to visit our website for that campaign at http://fundraiser.pitivi.org/ , as we've put a lot of effort into explaining all this in details !

    1. Re:Very enthusiastic about that effort ! by Catamaran · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The problem with gstreamer, and anything based on it, is that it is a single-process model. That's fine as long as all the processing elements play nicely, but one poorly written plugin can bring everything crashing down and then you have to sift through lots of rubble to figure out what happened. Also, it doesn't scale like a distributed architecture would. Also, gstreamer is only now starting to think about support for GPGPUs.
      Still, gstreamer is the best open-source flow-based framework that we have for now.

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      Test 1 2 3 4
    2. Re:Very enthusiastic about that effort ! by Mathieu_Du · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'd much rather have "everything crashing down" than having to debug an inconsistent state where multiple *processes* run and some silently crash .. GStreamer is multithreaded, and that brings us the benefits of parallel execution without the "advantage" that you describe and that I perceive as a drawback. Regarding hardware acceleration, a lot of work is being done by multiple industry players to bring it to GStreamer, it's indeed quite new but things are moving fast !

  9. Re: I'm surprised by TyFoN · · Score: 2

    I'm using it all the time :)
    Most of the "professional" features are there, you have tons of filters and exporting is really easy although I usually export to qp 0 h264 and then encode it myself using ffmpeg/x264.
    It seems that it is using the same libraries though so I might be able to do it from within now too.

    Anyway.. I'm never paying for another video editor as long as Kdenlive is maintained.

  10. Lightworks is Linuxy by log0n · · Score: 2

    and awesomey.

    http://www.lwks.com/