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The Current State of Linux Video Editing
An anonymous reader writes: The VFX industry has for most of the last 30 years been reliant on Macs and Windows machines for video editing, primarily because all of the Linux-based FOSS tools have been less than great. This is a shame, because all of the best 3D and 2D tools, other than video, are entrenched in the Linux environment and perform best there. The lack of decent video editing tools on Linux prevents every VFX studio from becoming a Linux-only shop. That being said, there are some strides being made to bridge this gap. What setup do you use? What's still missing?
Blender, a 3D animation suite, and a powerful video editor. Have not looked back since using Blender. Also comes with a python console, where really powerful scriptability can be reached. What else could one need?
I've found kdenlive is great - I've had to make a couple of small videos recently,it was a breeze with a couple of minor hiccups
1. As mentioned figuring out how to do transitions was hard - they're there, just hard to figure out
2. Ubuntu .... grrr .... their last distro has broken libraries (libav+melt - broken for lots of video editors, not just kdenlive) you can happily edit away but when you try and make the final stream, no audio -apparently all they need to do is to rebuild their binaries
Second this, kdenlive is decent for quick edit jobs. I can line up multiple videos and substitute or augment audio when I need to. So shooting some footage and adding a soundtrack is doable. Its been super stable for me for a while now - but as with all software your mileage may vary significantly there. It does lack the easy and polish if iMovie and more professional options. I hope it gets there.
LightWorks is not FOSS. It works on Linux but so do Maya, Bitwig, RenderMan, and so on. Neither of those is FOSS.
There is professional software available for Linux in this market but just like OSX and Windows you have to pay for them.
Audacity is a simple wave editor, not a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
Audacity's direct competition are GoldWave, Nero Wave Editor, and so on and Audacity blows them all out of the water in areas that are objectively measurable, i.e. file compatibility, encoding performance, etc.
But comparing Audacity to a DAW is unfair. They are just different things with just some overlapping feature set – kinda like comparing a pure text editor with a word processor.
I believe video editing software didn't come out for the Mac until 1986 -- it was something by Sorenson IIRC. I remember seeing a camera with its video out hooked up to the Plus and being amazed. The video was black and white and 512x386 pixels, of course.
And the real powerhorse for video editing 25 years ago was the Commodore Amiga and the Video Toaster (and Kitchen Sync). This setup was used by broadcast orgs and movie editors for a decade (until around 2000) at which point digital video started to take over. At this point, Video GIMP was a contender, along with Avid Studio and even iMovie.
So yeah; it's really only been the past 10 years or so that Windows and Mac offerings have surged ahead of Linux offerings (with Video GIMP getting its own project but not really moving any further ahead).
I confirm KDE is OK. I just finished a 2-hour project, with 3 cameras plus an audio recorder, and bad video that I had to fix from any imaginable point of view (chromatic aberration, colors, contrast).
KDE started to fall apart badly when I began to have three levels of nested projects: my main project uses virtual clips that are in fact projects, which in turn use virtual clips that are smaller projects. When you do this, with many tracks in each project, and complicated effects that have lots of keyframes, kdenlive segfaults often. When you do slightly less than that, it is perfectly fine.
Another limitation: kdenlive works not-so-well with video formats that have keyframes. You need to put your clips in a format where each image is compressed separately.
The VFX industry has for most of the last 30 years been reliant on Macs and Windows machines for video editing
You seem to have skipped SGI hardware, and software like Discreet Flame/Fire, which defined both video and film editing for a decade.
It's daunting for the first few days (yep, days) but you'll get used to the blender workflow.
To edit video you need to go into VSE mode. You have to learn it, you can't just brute force and guess your way around, so go watch a bunch of tutorial videos (search: blender vse or blender visual sequence editor) and you'll be flying.
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Kdenlive
Kdenlive is great if you just want to edit some holiday movie or pictures. In my experience, the resulting movies look good, and any ugly problems can be associated with the limitations on my camera, not Kdenlive. It's an easy user interface, and it only gets complicated when you want to do more advanced effects (the complexity comes from the number of options, meaning you have to go through some menus and try out a bunch of things). Btw, last time I used Kdenlive, I used Linunx Mint 16, and had no problems with audio (or any problem in general). Also, the crashes that I used to experience in 2012 seem to be gone completely.
SlowMoVideo
I also used SlowMoVideo, to make slow motion videos and to speed up videos (which I then put into Kdenlive to become part of a larger project). It works, although its user interface has a rather steep learning curve (not the most intuitive interface). It lacks a simple method to just slow down or speed up a movie by a factor two. It appears that the makers expect people to want to use the full range of options all the time. (I realize that asking for less options will upset some people... sorry).
Pencil
Finally, I also used Pencil to make some animations. In my case, quality was poor, but that says a lot about my drawing skills, and little about the program. What I missed a lot was an easy method to stitch a series of pictures together into a movie. I think that Pencil claims to provide one, but I never got it to work. In desperation, I used some awful command-line tool and it took me ages to figure out the exact code to type in to get the desired effect.
Maya runs on Linux, and I think this is what a lot of the big VFX houses use it on. Nuke is like that too, along with Houdini. Not sure about the complete list, but there are a lot of high-end 3D and compositing programs that support Linux.
Video editing, on the other hand, tends to be lacking, which is what the article addresses.