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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?
Tried it again recently, and I was able to add a four-minute video from my phone, cut out a chunk, add a transition and a fade-in and fade out, and took me less than half an hour.
It's true, that would have taken me five minutes in iMovie in 2000, but at least it didn't crash, which is what happened every previous time I've tried that.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I hand draw each scene then patch them all together.
Maybe its time to try something new, can SystemD help with this?
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
Things won't improve until two things are addressed. First FOSS devs drop the attitude that "It crashes sometimes" is an acceptable condition for software intended for productive work. This is compounded by FOSS users being tolerant of crashy software because it suits their ideology. Second, UI/UX need to be more than an afterthought or secondary consideration. People tolerate KiCad and Audacity's god-awful UIs because they're FOSS. There's no reason FOSS can't have consistent operation and polished presentation, other than clashes of ego.
"most of the last 30 years" - which I suppose you could interpret as "16 years"
The issue is money. The Mac and PC products are major dollars multiplied by a major quantity of installs which equals $$$$ for development. And people are willing to pay those prices as the market clearly shows. Unless you have a large player make the investment (like a major studio) or unless you get a huge developer base (like Linux has) you aren't going to end up with anything compelling.
TFS could be slightly misleading. DreamWorks, Industrial Light and Magic, and other major studios have been using Linux for a long time, along side MacMac and some Windows. It's not that they don't use Windows, they are multiplatform, where the person doing hair on a character may use a completely different software stack from the person doing the mouth.
PiTiVi is still going strong, even though it only take 30seconds to break it in Unity.
Probability of seeing it in 16.04 is about $12,327 to 1+ bug reviews of whatever Ubuntu-Y will be.
That should say:
It's not that they don't use LINUX, it's that they are multiplatform.
Lightworks is a Linux-first NLE that added Windows and recently Mac versions. It is the editor of choice for many in the "major motion picture" realm. You've seen its results at your local multiplex. Operationally, it emulates a Steenbeck flatbed film editor. www.lwks.com
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.
cinelerra is a very capable open source video editing system for linux.
I use it on an I7 system with a gig of memory, and it handles everything I have done with it very well.
all of the best 3D and 2D tools, other than video, are entrenched in the Linux environment and perform best there.
What? Sure Blender is hugely impressive but the other leaders in that space (MAX, Maya, Cinema4D, Lightwave, etc) are Windows-based (or OSX). And most certainly the go-to tools for 2D like Photoshop, Motion, Illustrator, After Effects and other production tools like Flame, FumeFx, Turbulence, Phoenix FD, etc.. are all Windows or OSX software.
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).
Interesting conclusion they come to with Blender. They have been making rapid improvements and enhancements to both features and interface. I've dabbled in Blender before and after the 2.5 redesign and while I didn't actually find the old Blender difficult to use (it took me 30 mins of dedicated time), the new one is better still. BUT I haven't used the video editing stuff, though I do know it was there. Must give it a try next time.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
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.
Linux has the super low end and the super high end well covered, but it has a few serious areas that are lacking.
On the low end, OpenShot definitely beats windows movie maker, and it's about as good as iMovie, so for vloggers, it's all you'd need.
On the high end, Lightworks and Cinelerra are both powerful, comparable to Avid, but less stable, and the learning curve is steep; too steep for an amateur who is just messing around to master quickly.
But for a start up or mid-range video production company, neither option is acceptable. OpenShot is simply not good enough for their needs, and the high end is too much, the training costs for employees would be significant. There is no Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, or Final Cut 7 for the mid range companies to work with.
I've also had trouble rendering to h.264 in Linux. The files are sometimes corrupt - refusing to load in anything other than VLC, sometimes lacking features, like progressive upload that is youtube friendly, or just plain poor quality - not all renderers are made equal, some look better at a given bit rate than others.
-I only code in BASIC.-
I remember in 1988 getting my hands on a scanner, and doing frame-by-frame drawings, scanning them in, and using that to create animated sprites and backgrounds for a game. That was state of the art in 1988. At that point, video was still a splice-tape-record job, and visual effects were applied as either by-frame modifications to the film or as a filter applied during the filming process. Think "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".
I got CE for like $30 or $40 back in the day/ Even accounting for inflation, AA is WAY MORE EXPENSIVE. Even after the purchase by Adobe, I think the cost to existing CE users was in the hundreds of dollars. They may have added cool things for power users but for casual users I'd rather wrestle with Audacity.
My video toaster is still going strong ;-)
If I couldn't use it for 3d animation, what makes you think I can use it for video editing... and since when can a 3d designer do video editing anyways...
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Anyone else use Cinelerra? I couple years ago it was a bit unstable at times but had some powerful features. It is probably only better now, although I haven't checked myself.
I'd still rather use Cool Edit from 1998 than Audacity. I'm glad we have a free tool like Audacity, but I currently use Adobe Audition 1.0 (they bought Cool Edit way back) running in Wine, which is a much better solution IMO.
If you want something like Adobe Audition, you should get something like Adobe Audition and not try to use a simple wave editor as DAW substitute. Get Bitwig Studio: https://www.bitwig.com/en/bitw...
I heard it's by former Ableton people, so they know their stuff.
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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Back in the late 1990's, we edited Geeks in Space Slashdot Radio with Cool Edit. It was great for normalizing & compressing the recording levels from Slashdot HQ, we could do noise gates, speed up/slow down audio, etc.
http://cinelerra.org/1/
As the proprietary vendors business models change, Linux video editing has increasing advantages, e.g. the lack of "subscription" business model. Avidemux is very powerful and actively developed.
If you have a Windows install and you buy Adobe Premiere Elements for $90, you will discover you must sign in, and Premiere Elements will max out your incoming internet connection for the entire time the program is open. But Premiere Elements works fine for video editing if you disable networking in control panel. So what's it doing with all that bandwidth?!
developers cum cats who don't like being herded in the same direction; so you get 50 versions of something all half assed trying to do the same thing. That, instead of one or two versions doing it in a most excellent way if the same developers worked together and learned give and take instead of 'take my ball and go fork it'.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
DaVinci Resolve, by Blackmagic Design, is used in actual Hollywood movies (though I don't know if those Hollywood studios are using the Linux version or not).
Personally, I have high expectations for VideoLAN Movie Creator (because my experience with VLC Media Player has been excellent). Unfortunately, it's been in an "under-development" state for almost as long as I can remember. I just hope they get to a complete, stable release sometime soon. http://www.videolan.org/vlmc/
- James
frist psot!
looks like you frailed.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I use OpenShot exclusively for my video projects, except for very simple cuts [1].
It's moderately powerful with multiple tracks, fairly easy to use and has some great filters (effects) - making a video with picture-in-picture boxes for example is trivial.
Where it falls down is that it doesn't remember your encoding preferences, so for large edits it quickly becomes cumbersome having to set all your encoding tweaks every single time.
I also haven't found an easy way to transition the picture from one video track to another and back. There are defined fade transitions but they all seem to depend on the order of the tracks in the stack.
[1] Avidemux with Qt is my quick-cut editor of choice - it lets you cut out parts of a video and, so long as you start on a keyframe, can save it without having to re-encode the video or audio streams. This is a massive time and quality saver.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I've been using OpenShot heavily lately. I like it.
It has some bugs but it gets the job done. Surprisingly well. The other big thing going for it is that it is incredibly simple to use.
I started to use Blender but I had to abandon it. It was going to require a significant investment of time to be able to do similar stuff. I just don't have the time at the moment.
.
I'd like to point out Cinelerra even though I don't use it, yet.
In a similar vein though, I am a big user of Ardour, Jack and jammin to produce music. The tools are appropriate for the task and, whilst not perfect, didn't cost me money and allows me to be able to focus on my projects. Since I don't pay for the application my only investment is the time to learn it, the same reason people stick within a certain commercial platform. The difference is the Ardour project allows any financial contribution I make to be in preference of features I'd like added, improving the efficiency of my workflow. Becoming productive in complex software is the biggest factor in using it and the only incentive to change is when one type of software can do things the others can't.
I think the emphasis of these questions does not apply appropriately. It should be 'What is the current State of the Art in Video production in linux" and the answer is it hasn't caught up to the state of the art in audio production under linux.
Now before the criticisms begin, I find Ardour architecturally superior to commercial audio tools because of the underlying jackd infrastructure, not because of its feature set. I have watched the developments in the audio production space over the last decade produce change radically as they became more stable. Nothing interesting is happening in the commercial audio production space, it's all happening in Linux. As infrastructure advancements similar to jackd becomes more common in video editing the application space their will undergo a similar change - just not yet.
Any investment in time to produce an A/V product requires yielding value on a previous time investment in a skillset. When I invest that skillset in proprietary software my knowledge investment can be rendered useless overnight quite easily however, open source tools provide me with a way to protect my knowledge investment because the software has it's own intrinsic rights.
Value on knowledge investment is the value proposition of open source. You may have to put up with some bugs however, tolerating them means not incurring static initialization costs from learning over and over and that results in a permanent knowledge base, the basis for radically inventive ideas.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You forgot the excellent InkScape.
Gimp is a joke compared to Photoshop. "Good enough" for small stuff; completely lacking features for anything serious.
Thanks for that. Bitwig looks excellent. After a few days of playing with it, I'm sure I'll end up buying it.
sig: sauer
Premiere Pro and FCP on MACOS/X
And the OSS freaks forgot about things like Motion, After Effects, Logic Pro (and a very large community of audio and synth plugins) that goes with media production. Video editing is just the tip of the iceberg.
If I want a Unix box I will just use one. What is this zeal to Linuxify everything? Mac is very good at Media editing. And it IS a Unix box, and yes, I do spend most of my life on a command line.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
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.
There are excellent video/audiosuits for linux which you can buy, so not being able to go linux only is BS..... And 3D and 2D are still best on Windows..
Audacity should be competing with Sound Forge and Wavelab, but it hasn't changed in the last 10 years or more and it shows.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
What exactly other 2D and 3D tools are "entrenched in the Linux environment" exactly?
There's always Emacs...
That because there where two products, Cool Edit and Cool Edit Pro. When Adobe purchased the software they dropped Cool Edit and turned Cool Edit Pro in to Audition. Interesting that you can run Audition in Wine, I have been running it in a VirtualBox Windows XP VM for some years now, but Wine would have lower overheads...
Sadly though, Reaper (for Windows only) is the DAW you want to use, not Ardour (Linux) or even Pro Tools (Windows, sort of industry standard for small / amateur projects). You can trust me on that one (because I've used different tools in real projects) or or have a look at a few forum threads to see what others say. No affiliation. It's just better and it makes things easier.
"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." I don't know of any surface modeler software for Linux that uses NURBS (the state of the art method, mostly) for working with surfaces, like Rhinoceros 3D or Alias do (both Windows only).
I've just posted a related comment. I agree with above. Wings 3D and Blender are pretty good Mayas, though. Agreed on AutoCAD too, although I don't like it, and favor SolveSpace (Windows only) for that sort of stuff. Like I've mentioned, what I can't seem to find is a good (NURBS) surface modeler, like Rhinoceros 3D or Alias.
Oh, of course it is, sorry, I was thinking PC since that's what I use, silly me.
>all of the best 3D and 2D tools, other than video, are entrenched in the Linux environment and perform best there
Um, no. What a ridiculous statement. Maya is for Windows and OSX only.
Maya has been available for Linux for years. See http://www.autodesk.com/produc...: "Available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems." It's just the free trial that isn't available for Linux.
Yes? Please continue.
And it's for Linux.
http://www.tracktion.com/
Audacity 2.0 introduced multi-track editing, but your comment still stands. It's not suited for any realistic workflow or editing audio synced with video.
Video NLE on Linux or, more preciseley, in the FOSS department, is lacking. In recent years there are some tools that have become feasible - Pitivi comes to mind - but Video Editing has always been a high-end specialised market. Anybody doing video editing professionally has a full-time job already and no time to programm software on the side.
On top of that, there has been a huge consolidation in the Video NLE market, with vendors and products dropping left, right and center or simply entrenching themselves in their established niche of mostly gouvernment or conglomerate funded media - such as Avid or Media 100.
The climax of this development was Apple sewerely screwing up final cut pro as they switched to App Store versions only. Lots of much needed pro features broke or disappeared without a trace and the people moved to Adobe Premiere Pro in droves.
Then again, that premiere pro and final cut where the last big players in the field shows that there's been quite some cleaning out.
With 3D it's a little different in FOSS, because we have Blender. But let's not forget that Blender is a very fortunate exception. It has a little built-in NLE and a very neat compositor, but still is mainly a 3D toolkit. It used to be a commercial tool and we managed to buy it free for 100 000€, keeping the lead developer at the same time (Ton Roosendaal). Despite being in active development, Blender still has tough competition in the professional field, although they've been feeling the heat from Blender free offering vs. their 900$ - 6000$ range of products.
What we need in video is a programm like Fusion or Shake going full FOSS and the lead developers staying with the product, funded by a foundation or something. Or a crew like Pitivi actually getting through and sustaining with their crowd-funding model and adding in all the pro features people want.
Personally, I'm going to look into Pitivi this year to see if it holds up on simple to mid-range video tasks. They appear to be very ... avid (no pun intended) and active. Maybe it's even matured further. But I don't expect miracles. If you want to do non-trivial video work today, you need tools like Fusion, Avid and the likes - and those are all closed-source.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
but no one serious uses it
After trying their now free version, I can see why. To close a window, you drag a shark onto it? Seriously?
You are correct, Lightworks is available for Windows, Linux, & OSX.
Ha! I remember those. I only listened to a few, though.
Even though they're kind of goofy, there's some good tech history in those recordings. Those were simpler times, eh?
sig: sauer
Also worth noting that Avid owns Sibelius now too (music scoring software). They've become the one-stop shop for multimedia editing using excellent back-end tools with stale UI.
While Avid was available in the mid 90s, it wasn't what was being used professionally; it took a while to mature. Professionals, for the most part, were using custom hardware and Amigas.
In your opinion, which is obviously heavily skewed towards FOSS.
I had to do some simple editing (changing speed and so on) in a 2h audio file a few months ago. GoldWave 5 was completely unusable â" it just crashed. GoldWave 6 beta worked but at super slow speed on a 64 bit Win 8.1 Core i7 system. After 15 Minutes of waiting for the FLAC file to save, I just gave up. (GoldWave was my first wave editing love, so if anything my opinion was skewed towards that.)
Audacity was (and still is) not pretty but unlike GoldWave it worked. I prefer working software over non-working software and as simple wave editor Audacity does the job.
Sadly though, Reaper (for Windows only) is the DAW you want to use, not Ardour (Linux) or even Pro Tools (Windows, sort of industry standard for small / amateur projects). You can trust me on that one (because I've used different tools in real projects) or or have a look at a few forum threads to see what others say. No affiliation. It's just better and it makes things easier.
And others say Reaper, the product of former Winamp developers, sucks and you should use Ableton Live instead. Others say Logic Pro.
I'm not a musician myself but I know a few and each has their own preference.
Blender is not going to address the needs of a VFX facility. Having a python checkbox isn't enough to handle the sorts of scenes and needs of a feature film vfx shot in most situations. There is a reason CG supervisors still pick Max, Maya or Houdini over "free" software and that's the cost of productivity. $3,000 is a small price to pay compared to being even 10% more productive. The average VFX artist is paid at least $65,000. So if you need 10% more artists to do the same thing in the same amount of time then you're paying $6,500 per year in lost productivity. That's substantially more expensive than $1,000 per year for maintenance. Which isn't to say that there aren't good video editing applications for Linux. For VFX studio editing needs Nuke Studio is enough and it runs on Linux:
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/pr...
In fact from a VFX facility's perspective it integrates better into a pipeline than any of the other commercial editing applications and it works well with Nuke which is the defacto standard for compositing.
If we're talking about NLEs for VFX then the obvious choice would be Nuke Studio (http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/studio/) It's integrated with Nuke which is used everywhere and it's a multiplatform app which runs on Linux, OSX and Windows.
Davinci is also for Linux and it's got pretty decent editing capabilities now. And like Nuke Studio it also has lots of VFX friendly features like handles and solid EDL support.
Another obvious option are the Autodesk (Discreet) systems. Flame Premium 2013 supports Linux. For a while there Flame/Inferno were exclusively linux.
So there is plenty of VFX editing on Linux, it's just pricey for the most part and not at all open source.
Audacity 2.0 introduced multi-track editing, but your comment still stands. It's not suited for any realistic workflow or editing audio synced with video.
Have you ever tried simple wave editing in a surround sound file?
Among the non-professional / low-end tools Audacity is apparently the only wave editor to support that at least to some degree (although the channel mapping window when saving is awkward).
In the end I used ffmpeg and SoX
I have not tried simple wav editing on a surround file.
When I said multi-track, I didn't mean surround. I meant multiple stereo tracks that can be layered during editing. Which is absolutely essential for video, but also for studio music recording (one for drum, one for vocals, etc.). But surround support is something I didn't expect that Audacity had.
You are dead right. I tend to associate DAW to multitracker-like software because that's what suits my own way of making music best (I play in bands so I work the traditional "recording studio" way), but DAW is a generic term to describe a music tool that handle various tasks (sequencing, multitrack recording, editing, score writing, synth, mixing, mastering and so on), regardless of it resembling a multitracker, a sequencer (Logic) or whatever else (Ableton Live). Recording studios use multitrack software and that's what I do all the time, but other tools can be regarded as DAW just as well. I guess the reason why different people have their own preference for DAW is that music is not about doing recording studio work only, and different artists have their own way of approaching their creative processes.
Audacity does not have true surround support. The individual tracks can be mapped to a channel when saving. It's not a smooth way to support that feature but it's way ahead of the competition (i.e. GoldWave etc.)
In other words, you can't even play it back. But if you already had a surround file you could import it and do basic cuts. I'm assuming exporting to mapped surround is just a tiny bonus to multi-track editing just because it could technically be done.
> I find the Blender to be awfully unintuitive.
Everyone does. The explanation I read was that 3d video is complex and very different from word processors etc. and you need a very specialised interface.
There are various keyboard shortcut cheat sheets you can print and stick to the wall:
http://ostrovskeho.sk/ucivo/da...
https://www.google.be/search?q...
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