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Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com)
Robin 'Roblimo' Miller
discusses
the state of Linux video editing tools in a Linux.com article.
"Once or twice a year I look at FOSS video editing tools to see if they're ready for everyday use by advanced amateur and low-end professional video makers, which is where I classify myself in the video production hierarchy. There have been several notable improvements recently that have moved FOSS video editing tools a little closer to practicality, but FOSS desktop video editing still has a long way to go before it can be taken seriously by people who need to turn out high-quality video productions on tight deadlines."
(Log in to post comments)
ieee1394 work for me since 2001 Posted Mar 15, 2007 21:31 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] I am a bit surprised : I have been dealing with video capturing since 2001 and I have never had a single problem with ieee1394 Linux support.
Generally I have found capturing with kino under Linux to be easier and more reliable than under some proprietary OS. On the other hand, I found Cinelerra very unreliable, but maybe that has improved since I last tried it.
ieee1394 work for me since 2001 Posted Mar 15, 2007 21:38 UTC (Thu) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link] I tried to use Cinelerra but it really wasn't to my liking. Otoh, I found kino muchmore friendlier, easier and quite sufficient for my needs.
ieee1394 work for me since 2001 Posted Mar 15, 2007 22:55 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] Were you using built-in firewire hardware? I wouldn't be surprised if PCMCIA firewire worked a lot less well than PCI for a while.
It has improved Posted Mar 16, 2007 13:30 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Cinelerra has definitely improved lately. Since the CV version started moving along, crashes are mostly a thing of the past and features are added regularly.Its main problem is that it allows for a wide variety of operations, which are complex in themselves (panning, zooming, rotating, scaling, fading volumes...), so the interface gets a little confusing. It is a very powerful program and it is being used for HD video editing. Try it out, you will be surprised.
Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com) Posted Mar 15, 2007 22:35 UTC (Thu) by jmorgan6 (guest, #4240) [Link] I am not into video production but I thought "Hollywood" used Linux for movie making?
Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com) Posted Mar 15, 2007 22:43 UTC (Thu) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link] Hollywood uses it for special effects rendering on number crunching clusters, for digital image retouching - with FilmGimp/Cinepaint - and for 3D modelling and other graphics manipulation with expensive, proprietary software originally developed for Silicon Graphics computers. It's not being used for video editing in a professional field.
Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com) Posted Mar 16, 2007 1:35 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] What sort of business does enough video editing to make it worth it for them to write or heavily contribute to such a package. All the users of AVID and friends I'm aware of are small shops and consultancies. Maybe the nature of the work is not an easy fit to open source?
Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com) Posted Mar 16, 2007 4:51 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] My understanding is that Linux is popular for 'composition' style video editing.
A example of a program you'd buy for something like that would be Discreet Smoke:
You can't realy buy the program seperate, you have to purchase the entire machine as a unit. They have 2 versions, a '2k' version and a 'hd' version. Both are only aviable for 64bit Linux.
Cinelerra and friends are used for 'Non-Linear' style editing, which is what Linux is not generally used for. This is typically what people talk about when they talk about 'video editing' since it's the sort of thing people do with PCs and such.
(although Cinelerra is both NLE and composition editor. Also Blender, the 3d suite (editing, animation, rendering), does composition also.)
Previously it used to be that when editing film, at least from a smaller studio point of view, you would record your footage onto film (the photographic cells type) then digitalize it.
You would take this digital copy of it, muck around with it until you had it how you'd like it in a NLE like Final Cut Pro or whatever in Mac or Windows. Do the sound tracks and such.
Then take the film and the digitally edited version into a place were they would then splice the film version to match the version you made in your NLE and then that would be the final print.
Something like that. Just what I've heard other people talk about. Also depends on what sort of thing you like. Some people like to do all-film if possible, other people don't care.
However with more modern movies they are moving to a more and more all-digital format and workflow. It's a lot cheaper and quicker I expect.
The first movie made using Linux was Titanic. The Lord of the Ring movies were made using Linux, at least the 2nd two. The first one probably had a lot of SGI stuff still being used.
They used Gimp to make the textures for the first Shrek movie. They said that Gimp was the best editor for making textures, but they were starting to get headaches with it's 8bit limitation. (you'd never use 8 bit and I doubt you'd be happy with 16bit per channel color if your doing film editing though. I expect that this was for textures only)
But realy it's mostly just a crapload of propriatory and in-house software running on Linux stuff and is pretty irrelevent to normal people doing low to midrange sort of things.
Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com) Posted Mar 16, 2007 4:56 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Oh and you can thank the movie folks for those propriatory Nvidia and ATI video drivers.
They are probably the main reason why Nvidia/ATI give a crap at all about Linux. Nvidia seems to care a little bit beyond that, but I don't think that ATI cares at all.
Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com) Posted Mar 16, 2007 1:24 UTC (Fri) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] Lives just released version 0.9.8.3, and it isn't mentioned in the article (but is mentioned in the comments). I haven't tried it, but probably will soon. It looks promising, but the software author has a big banner on the project page saying he's completely broke, and needs donations (and maybe some other developers to help?).
kdenlive! Posted Mar 16, 2007 4:16 UTC (Fri) by jebba (subscriber, #4439) [Link] I've been lamenting the same thing for years... I don't need to do Hollywood effects, I just want a simple timeline to dump images, video, and sound. If it can handle a huge number of formats, that's a bonus. Something along the same lines as audacity in the audio realm (as opposed to the more powerful and more complex ardour).
kino has been solid for years (the 90s?) and so has firewire for me. But for editing, it just doesn't cut it... Cinelerra has always been crashy for me and the interface makes me want to run. Jahshaka looks "interesting", but I just don't get it (though it has done a lot of good work on underlying libraries apparently). LiVES and others are more geared for vjaying. Pitivi has "cutting" on it's TODO list... KDEnlive, looked good, but I haven't checked it out in awhile.
Until today. I grabbed SVN, dumped in some fotos, dropped in an mp3 file, an mpeg4 video, export timeline to .vob and guess what? It's working. And it even has a sensible interface. At last!
http://kdenlive.sourceforge.net/
-Jeff
kdenlive! Posted Mar 17, 2007 15:11 UTC (Sat) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link] Thanks for the update Jeff!Me too was wondering why kdenlive wasn't mentioned and where it was at, nice to hear it has gotten there!
Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com) Posted Mar 16, 2007 6:42 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link] This one's no different from the "Linux is not ready for the desktop"-crowd who installed a distribution and found their unsupported wifi or multifunction printer completely ... unsupported.
Instead we are served a long rant on Linux.com of poor Robins hardware problems and how Cinelerras interface takes 10x the time to work with (obviously not true if you had spent an hour with the tutorial), or how some other program lacks a timeline (I haven't looked at it, but perhaps it works some different way?).
The very least you can do when you set out to do something with Linux is to start with supported hardware. I'm not so stupid so I would buy a Windows computer and declare it to be completely unusable for music production since Logic Pro doesn't run. Then after that I expect the reviewer to spend as much time with it and give it as much chance as any other product.
What's with Linux.com nowadays? The seem to only publish rants and "reviews" that consists of a brief description of the program and a screenshot or two from a standard installation. I could've gotten that from the home page. Soon I won't bother to click through their so called "news" anymore. A pity on a nice domain name.
Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com) Posted Mar 16, 2007 10:07 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] That's odd. I peered carefully at the article and couldn't see that his review software was trying to use unsupported hardware, Firewire or otherwise. The author obviously has extensive experience of editing on other platforms and knows what hardware is needed for what sort of task. His conclusions seem pretty fair to me.
Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com) Posted Mar 16, 2007 13:14 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] This firewire PCMCIA card could certainly qualify as 'unsupported hardware'.I have never had any problem with built-in ieee1394 controler in the dozen or so laptops I have used.
(And I hope it was a CardBus card rather than PCMCIA, because PCMCIA is 16bit )
Open source video editing still has a long way to go (Linux.com) Posted Mar 16, 2007 20:24 UTC (Fri) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link] That wasn't a 'long rant', it was a very clear and fairly objective view. I read the same thing you read, and I was actually going to post and thank the author for being fairly informative.
I really appreciate it when people who are fairly knowledgeable about their specific area of interest take the time to dig into what is available in the free software world, and then rank it according to a set of requirements they have.
That's just how I do it too. One problem the Free Desktop scene has had, and continues to have, in terms of getting more users, is a bad habit of misrepresenting what the stuff can do. I doubt this is done on purpose, but the end result is the same, users try it, find that the programs they need aren't quite there yet, then go back to windows.
I did this with a friend who is a professional composer, we took a look at some of the free tools available, he poked around them, and in one case, within just a few minutes knew he couldn't use the tool professionally. But that doesn't mean he's giving up, in fact at some point he'll probably start talking to the composition software team and let them know what features they are missing. Their site asks for this, they know it's not ready to compete with something like Finale yet too.
Some parts of the Free Desktop are far superior to Windows, the operating system and kernel comes to mind, as well as many core apps and tools, others are fairly comparable, k3b for example, but others just aren't there yet. That last set seems to primarily be single apps targetted toward focused, near professional level work. But the lines are moving, things are changing very fast.
I now always ask windows users who are interested in exploring a move to a Free Desktop what their workflow is, what they use the machine for, etc. If they need a feature I know is not supported by say OpenOffice, or some Video Editing, Powerpoint, etc, stuff that I know really isn't at the level of the software they are using on Windows, I don't recommend they switch.
However, it's very encouraging to see how fast these borders are vanishing, this year I'm more likely to recommend Linux for example to a user who has basic requirements than I was last year, the changes are very noticeable, and very fast. But I still won't pretend that a user who needs product x or y for work should move until there is a way to handle that single app.
Currently I'm leaning more and more to just setting up a bottled windows in vmware or vbox for the user, and have them run that single app (it's almost always just one single core app that is the problem from what I can see) in a virtual machine.
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