LWN: Comments on "Video editing and free software"

Video editing and free software

bros — Mon, 11 May 2015 11:18:14 +0000

Note to myself - read the whole thread before replying.

Video editing and free software

bros — Mon, 11 May 2015 11:16:47 +0000

MLT/melt might be close enough to what you're referring to: http://www.mltframework.org/bin/view/MLT/WebHome

You are looking for something based on MLT

przemoc — Mon, 11 May 2015 09:06:23 +0000

Shotcut is the main MLT-based open source cross-platform video editor that is worth mentioning here as well.

Video editing and free software

nix — Thu, 07 May 2015 17:01:26 +0000

Have a look at vapoursynth. It has many fewer plugins for now, but has the significant advantage of using a decent scripting language (it's implemented as a program that embeds Python 3).

Video editing and free software

aleb — Thu, 07 May 2015 14:57:36 +0000

You can already do that with GES, Pitivi's backed, for example:

$ ges-launch-1.0 +clip video.MTS i=2 d=4 set-mute true +effect agingtv +clip audio.mp3 d=4 layer=1

You are looking for something based on MLT

gwolf — Thu, 07 May 2015 13:15:15 +0000

MLT (or Melt, http://www.mltframework.org/) is a video editing framework. It can be all driven from the command line (we use it to add i.e. a cover page and superimposed logo to our videos as they are produced), but it has also a very rich interface over which a full nonlinear video editor can be used. Kdenlive is built using MLT as its driving force.

Video editing and free software

cortana — Thu, 07 May 2015 12:04:58 +0000

I think this is the kind of thing that AviSynth is good for. Only works on Windows though--it's tightly coupled to the legacy Video for Windows API IIRC.

Video editing and free software

krake — Thu, 07 May 2015 09:32:29 +0000

> The reason is that less than one percent of computer users use Linux, and of those less than one percent use NLEs.

Does this mean users of other operating system don't use NLEs or that this specific NLE is Linux only?

If the latter it might make sense to expand the operating system support to get into that 1% on other platforms

Video editing and free software

Felix — Thu, 07 May 2015 09:25:26 +0000

> I'd like to be able to write a script that says "import this video between these timecodes, stitch it together with this audio, apply these effects..."

I think gstreamer-editing-services (+ other gstreamer libraries) should satisfy that use case. Pitivi is mostly "just" a UI for these libraries. With the help of gobject you could write these scripts using Python or one of the other languages which have a gobject library.

Video editing and free software

roskegg — Thu, 07 May 2015 07:44:41 +0000

Agreed. It shouldn't take more than five minutes to open the program, import a video clip, and then insert text overlays, chop out bits, "stretch" or "speed up" parts, cut and paste parts to different locations, do a transition or effect over time span "x", etc. Those are such simple things, but as soon as you start any NLE in linux, you are expected to understand several different abstractions already. Instead of just "this is my video. I want to do THIS to my video". As bad as all those programmers IDE's that make you open a "project" before you can type a single line of code.

Video editing and free software

josh — Wed, 06 May 2015 23:32:16 +0000

Natron's programmable processing pipeline looks promising, as does Pitivi's usability. Personally, I'd love to see a Linux equivalent of VirtualDub for Windows (which is actually Open Source), which is oriented around scripting rather than a GUI. I'd like to be able to write a script that says "import this video between these timecodes, stitch it together with this audio, apply these effects...", and similar, with the ability to render quick previews as well as the final full-resolution version.