The first public release of OpenShot 2.0

The OpenShot video-editor project recently released builds from the long-awaited 2.0 series. Although they are still tagged as "betas," they offer a glimpse at what the development team has been up to since its previous stable update in late 2012. Many fans of OpenShot have learned to be patient, but the 2.0 is worth a look even for those with no prior experience.

The first beta release was announced on January 16, with binary builds provided only to the project's Kickstarter supporters (source code, of course, was available in the repositories). In February, the third beta (version 2.0.6) was made available to the public. Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X binaries are available for download, as are source code bundles.

The previous stable release was version 1.4.3 from October 2012. At that time, plans for 2.0 were already in discussion, and there were some overly optimistic estimates for when it might be released. The lengthy delay was the result of lead developer Jonathan Thomas's decision at that time to stop and rewrite nearly the entire application. OpenShot 2.0 is built on top of a new video-editing library (libopenshot) developed in-house to replace the Media Lovin' Toolkit (MLT) library used in the 1.x releases. In addition, 2.0 drops GTK+ for a completely rewritten PyQt5 user interface, and adds support for both Mac and Windows machines.

Considering the scope of the work involved, the repeatedly pushed-back release date for the 2.0 series is not surprising. In March 2013, Thomas ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund his own development time (predicting a December 2013 release date). Despite the slipping schedule, though, he has regularly posted progress updates about libopenshot and the application—no doubt contributing to the continued goodwill that the user community still expresses toward the project in forum posts and comments on the blog.

With the new beta releases, that community can finally put the new codebase to the test—and, because the 2.0 builds include all of the editing and export features found in 1.x (plus a few additions), users can try out the new release on projects similar in scope to those handled by the old OpenShot.

Users coming from other video editors will find the basic interface familiar enough to get started right away with little need for introduction. The main window provides an editing timeline where users can add video and audio tracks, a video player for previewing edits, and a tabbed browser that provides quick access to imported video clips, effects, and transitions. Clips are added to the timeline with drag-and-drop, and most of the additional tools for manipulating a clip are found in the right-click context menu. This includes fade-in and fade-out settings, audio volume, rotation, and even the "split" tool used to cut a clip into segments.

In fact, so many tools and settings have been moved into the context menu that users might be alarmed when they cannot find buttons or menu items for the features they need. In previous releases, for example, several of these settings were found in the "Properties" dialog for each clip. Now, the "Properties" entry in the context menu opens up a sidebar next to the panel that shows details like the start and end times, but leaves out most of those user-configurable properties of a clip now distributed among the context-menu entries. Such rearrangements can take some getting used to.

How transitions function is another noticeable change. In the past, OpenShot's UI for adding a transition between two clips was rather distinctive. The first clip and the second clip had to be on separate tracks in the timeline, and the "transition" element was a box that straddled the two tracks and had an arrow indicating the direction of the change. It was not hard to figure out, but it certainly violated the established rules of "how timelines work in a video editor" obeyed by, well, every other video-editing application.

In the new release, the user drags the two clips in question onto the same track so that they overlap. The transition element then gets planted on top of both. It is hard to say whether or not this is an improvement; nothing seems to be floating in the middle (as was the case in the old UI), but when the clips and transitions are stacked on top of each other, they can be hard to see. Since video effects (masks, blurs, brightness adjustments, and so on) are also stackable elements, one can easily end up with a half dozen translucent rectangles and text labels sitting right on top of each other on the timeline.

The other major UI component is the animated title editor, which pops up in a window of its own, and is rather straightforward to use. OpenShot 2.0 comes with 24 animated title templates, including everything from simple "words slide in from the side of the screen" effects to complicated 3D elements like a Star-Wars–style opening crawl and map flyover similar to those seen in Indiana Jones. Each template has its own battery of settings; the user adjusts them as desired (using a preview window to double-check the output), then OpenShot renders the template into a video clip to add to the timeline.

Apart from the basics, the release notes highlight several new UI features in the 2.0 series. One is a "multiple clip add" tool; for users importing a large collection of clips into a project, this tool can be used to automatically add them all to the timeline at once, with an optional gap added in between. Similarly, there is also a "Split Clip" tool with which the user can mark multiple sections within a longer clip and instantly extract each section into a clip of its own. This is handy for quickly cutting a long recording down into the just the interesting parts.

The new release also sports a larger selection of transitions (well over 300), and it even allows users to create and load transitions of their own. There is also a sizable assortment of newly added static (i.e., non-animated) title templates. Finally, the new release adds an auto-save feature and automated backup creation, which anyone who has invested serious time in a video project will probably be thankful for at some point.

For the average user, the OpenShot 2.0 builds may appear to be little more than a release on par with contemporary open-source video editors like Pitivi or Kdenlive. But it is clear that Thomas and the other developers have put in a substantial amount of work on the non-user-visible aspects of the new release, too. There are fewer application crashes now, since the front-end catches most exceptions. Libopenshot is making better use of multi-core machines via OpenMP, and offering smoother animations and audio processing. The library is also better at coping with odd or corrupted video files (where, in the past, it might crash), and the project file structure has been reworked to be completely portable across operating systems.

The OpenShot 2.0 rewrite was a massive undertaking, so the development team deserves a lot of credit for getting it done and providing users with a stable end product. The bigger question will be whether or not the reworked interface and brand-new editing library allow the project to push forward. After all, fans of video editors on Linux desktops have seen rewrites and forks announced many times in the past. Some, like Cinelerra and Lumiera, never seem to actually reach the light of day. Others, like Pitivi, are more successful, but progress on new features always seems to be slow. In many respects, that is due to the inherent complexity of video editing. Hopefully, then, the OpenShot 2.0 series and new libopenshot library will prove not only to be useful for users, but to be easier for the developers to work with as time goes by.