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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)
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.
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.
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.-
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.
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?!
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'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.
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.
What exactly other 2D and 3D tools are "entrenched in the Linux environment" exactly?
There's always Emacs...
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.