Archive
Lightworks Switches the Lights On
Apparently I missed the announcement back in April this year that EditShare is to release an Open Source version of their award winning non-linear video editor, Lightworks. Let me say that again; a well known, if not quite industry leading, professional non-linear video editor, as used in a number of Hollywood studios, is to move to an open source distribution model.
Cinelerra Quietly Releases New Version
Without much ado, Heroine Virtual has quietly released Cinelerra 4.1 earlier this month.
The Future of Cinelerra
It would be remiss if I did not at least mention the current buzz around Linux video editing tool Cinelerra. An article appeared on Linux.com a couple of days ago, outlining a new direction for the software that began life as Broadcast2000.
I’m not going to do a Cinelerra history lesson here, go and read the Linux.com article. What is more interesting is the desire to build a new Cinelerra (Cin3), completely divorced from the original Heroine Warrior sponsor.
I’ve actually been following the Cin3 discussion on the Cinelerra mailing list for some time now. At this stage discussion seems to be centered around what the new name for the software will be and what GUI toolkit to use. There’s a long way to go before Cin3 – or Verite as it may now be known – becomes a stable usable product.
And that’s where the problem lies. Cin3 may be another 2 or 3 years away from being production ready. What happens in the meantime? How much effort will be expended on developing and maintaining the existing Cinelerra 2? While such a long lead time may be needed for a community driven application of this complexity, it does open the opportunity for other projects, both commercial and Open Source, to carve out a large video editing market share on the Linux platform.
Already Blender incorporates a reasonably full featured video sequence editor. I wonder about the viability of spinning that off as a standalone piece of software. What if MainConcept did indeed decide to open source their now defunct MainActor editing tool? Perhaps Adobe, or Sony, or Pinnacle will take the plunge and release a Linux version of their video editors. If the Linux desktop continues to rise in popularity, these scenarios are distinct possibilities.
Already Cinelerra suffers from an image problem, allegedly being too complex to learn and generally unstable. Let’s hope the Cinelerra community team can forge ahead quickly to create an easy to use, but powerful, open source non-linear video editor.
Another FOSS Video Editor Round Up
Over at the BOHOL Blog, they’ve written a review covering a number of open source video editing software. Touched on in this article are Jashaka, Avidemux, Cinelerra, Kino and LiVES. The article is much more of an overview than a hands on review of the capabilities of each application.
Jashaka seems to receive the most attention. “Once finished, it would be in the same market space as Newtek’s Video
Toaster and Pinnacle Liquid Edition. With all promised features it
would be a rival to Adobe’s After Effects or Autodesk’s Combustion – in
fact the GUI is heavily based upon Combustion.” Big goals and high aims for Jashaka!
Recently Jah Shaka, the founder and lead for this project, says the “project has been liberated from its evil benefactors and is now free to
get back to its roots and start building the high end visual effects
tools it set out to deliver!”
Perhaps liberation from evil will result in the project moving forward again. Good luck to them.
The Grumpy Editor’s Video Journey
Looking for decent reviews of many available Linux video editors? Well, besides having the audacity to think my review of Open Movie Editor is decent, someone else has taken quite a lot of time to try out other open source video editing software.
The Grumpy Editor’s Video Journey begins with capturing content from his DV camera and finally creating a DVD from it. While both these articles are worth reading, the middle part interested me most, where he expounds upon Avidemux, Kino, Cinelerra, KDEnlive, LiVES and PiTiVi.
While it’s not news to many, this set of reviews is really just someone else affirming that Linux Video Editing is not yet at a very advanced level. We can all do something about this! Get involved with a project. Devote some time and energy to helping build the video editing tool you need.
