OpenShot 2.0 Remains To Be Seen

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenShot 2.0 Remains To Be Seen

It's been almost two and a half years since the last official release to the open-source OpenShot video editing software. OpenShot 2.0 has been talked about for much of this time but this major update to the once very promising non-linear video editor has yet to materialize...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenShot-2.0-MIA-2015

[faildozer]

I was literally just looking up OpenShot late last night, as I wanted to do some video editing.

It appears the launchpad is actually rather active as of late, as the lead developer has been working primarily on libopenshot and merging up some updates to the bazaar. Latest post was on February 5, 2015, with commits pushed to the bazaar earlier today.

https://launchpad.net/openshot/+announcement/13225

https://code.launchpad.net/libopenshot

[Luke]

Video editors not so lacking as you might think

Kdenlive shares with Openshot the MLT back end. It is a very powerful and full-featured video editor just as it stands. I use it all the time, not only for news videos but for the very complex "year in activism" videos I release at the end of each year. These can have around a hundred clips and run about 20 minutes, withtitlebars to identify places and a fair number of effects. With AMD FX-8120 these render in about a half hour and the timeline plays fine in Kdenlive except for slowing down on some heavy effects and on some transitions.

Last year's efforts to bring in GPU accelerated effects via the Movit library seem to have come to a slowdown, I am now downloading the latest test version from http://builds.meltytech.com/kdenlive/latest.rss to see if any progress has been made there. When it was last enabled the issue was greatly slowed playback and rendering, probably due to CPU-GPU memory copy bottlenecks. Still, the non-GPU accelerated version of Kdenlive can do almost everything that version was able to do except for being able to play a track heavy with effects without a further slowdown. What they had last summer would potentially be very fast on a HSA-enabled AMD Fusion chip, possibly enough to blow away the CPU only version on 8 core bulldozer after some HSA kernel work gets finished.

[omer666]

Video editors not so lacking as you might think

I'm sorry but on this point the article is right.
I use Linux for everything I want to do with a damn computer :
- LibreOffice covers all my needs and when I'm forced to use MS Office at work I come to think LO is better in many areas
- I use Ardour for audio production, both at home and in studio and it does compare really well to Cubase or ProTools (I never tried Logic, though)
- I used Scribus for producing CD covers and sending them to print
- My wife and myself use Darktable for all our photographic needs, including some paid work
- I use the GIMP from time to time and never felt too limited.

But if there's one thing I've NEVER been happy with, it's video editing. While kdenlive is very capble, feature-wise it's in no way comparable to FinalCut or Premiere. There was Cinelerra, but the interface is very dated and it's almost abandoned. A very promising software is PiTiVi, but seeing how the latest fund-raising campaign struggles, one would think there's no one wanting a solid video editing software on Linux.
It's a shame because it's one of those few pieces of software we don't have in FOSS, along with 3D CAD software (again, there are many projects but they never get mature enough...)

[Luke]

I've never used a proprietary video editor and never will

I'm sorry but on this point the article is right.
I use Linux for everything I want to do with a damn computer :
- LibreOffice covers all my needs and when I'm forced to use MS Office at work I come to think LO is better in many areas
- I use Ardour for audio production, both at home and in studio and it does compare really well to Cubase or ProTools (I never tried Logic, though)
- I used Scribus for producing CD covers and sending them to print
- My wife and myself use Darktable for all our photographic needs, including some paid work
- I use the GIMP from time to time and never felt too limited.

But if there's one thing I've NEVER been happy with, it's video editing. While kdenlive is very capble, feature-wise it's in no way comparable to FinalCut or Premiere. There was Cinelerra, but the interface is very dated and it's almost abandoned. A very promising software is PiTiVi, but seeing how the latest fund-raising campaign struggles, one would think there's no one wanting a solid video editing software on Linux.
It's a shame because it's one of those few pieces of software we don't have in FOSS, along with 3D CAD software (again, there are many projects but they never get mature enough...)

I've never used one of those proprietary editors so I would not know what those features are. I've blacklisted lightworks because they refuse to release source and rely on paid codecs while I also refuse to use. I've seen talk of GPU acceleration in the commercial editors, apparently the issues Kdenlive had with it are common, only Abobe got all the way around that by doing everything in the GPU and keeping it there. In my situation, I do not dare run closed software that can't be trusted not to phone home, especially when dealing with raw video clips of things the cops don't like.

To me and for my purposes, more features in a commercial editor are not relevant. The only thing I can't do in Kdenlive that I actually need is a Star Wars type title scroll, when I need those I do them in Blender and use the result of that as one clip. Have you run kdenlive RECENTLY? The color correction and related effects have hugely improved!

[Chewi]

My wife and I recently gave up waiting and switched to Kdenlive. We haven't looked back. It takes a little more getting used to but once you've figured it out, it boasts more features and is a hell of a lot more stable. There's room for improvement but it's probably the best of the free bunch right now.

[kenjitamura]

Kdenlive shares with Openshot the MLT back end.

From the sounds of things the developer for Openshot has dropped MLT in Openshot for the 2.0 release and he made new backend for it himself which is why Openshot 2.0 was looking to be such a big project he needed funding for full time development.

Last year's efforts to bring in GPU accelerated effects via the Movit library seem to have come to a slowdown, I am now downloading the latest test version from http://builds.meltytech.com/kdenlive/latest.rss to see if any progress has been made there. When it was last enabled the issue was greatly slowed playback and rendering, probably due to CPU-GPU memory copy bottlenecks.

To my knowledge the gpu acceleration in Kdenlive has been disabled until more work can be done on it. Right now Kdenlive is focusing on porting to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 in time to catch the 15.04 KDE Applications release. They then plan to refactor the code to make it more maintainable and remove obsolete code and then go back to GPU acceleration work. Among their future plans are things like integrating a better title editor. Kdenlive only very recently started to pick back up on more frequent code commits because for a year and a half the main developer behind Kdenlive, JBM, was having health issues and couldn't work on the project. He's been back for a few months and has Kdenlive almost completely ported to Qt5 already.

Also a reminder to people: There is another video editor that looks very promising in development called Shotcut. It uses the MLT backend like Kdenlive and shotcut is being developed by Dan Dennedy who is the developer mostly behind MLT. He used to code for the Kdenlive project but after switching over to Mac for his production machine he decided to start a new cross-platform video editor from the ground up because he viewed porting Kdenlive to other platforms to be too much effort and ultimately it'd be more effort than just starting from scratch. It's still in fairly early development but there is usually a new release every month.

[Licaon]

I was messing around video NLE these days too, settled on Cinelerra for now.

Now, Lightworks seems to be the real deal, but I was going the way of the intuition to get things working and that/I failed, did not bother with manuals/tutorials just yet.
On the other hand I got the hang of Cinelerra pretty fast, although my case is simple: 1920x1080p, 24fps, 1 main track vid+snd w/ some color grading and 2 vid effects tracks ( I film grain + 1 corrupted film )

Regarding Cinelerra, things get a bit muddy when choosing what version you can get:
1. original version is 4.6 from Sep 2014: http://www.heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php
2. community version is 2.2 from git+ppa whenever it get's updates: http://cinelerra-cv.org/about.php (ignore the version number, it works the same)
3. the .org colaboration 4.6-mod (original 4.6+patches from cv 2.2) from Feb 2015: http://cinelerra.org

Some issues seen by me with these versions:
1. original 4.6
*XV-OpenGL compositor does not work, and you can't exit Cinelerra once you select it, you need to kill it
*doesn't know DNxHD format (see below)
2. community 2.2
*XV-OpenGL compositor does not work, and you can't exit Cinelerra once you select it, you need to kill it
*does know DNxHD format; I had to transcode the clip and use it like this since with the camera saved .MOV on every key frame it kept showing a dialogue with a stupid quicktime decode warning.
3. moded 4.6
*can't use it whatsoever, I can't press buttons, menus, nothing, it just sits there and I need to kill -9 it

Also Shotcut ( http://www.shotcut.org ) mentioned above works ok, but I did not dig in that much.
Blender: has a NLE internally!!! ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te9HFQVaSUE )

@omer666: while the others you mentioned are rather well known, Darktable needs more praises and downloads.
Also, LightZone ( http://www.lightzoneproject.org ) has some good stuff too.

[skriticos]

I'm sorry but on this point the article is right.
I use Linux for everything I want to do with a damn computer :
- LibreOffice covers all my needs and when I'm forced to use MS Office at work I come to think LO is better in many areas
- I use Ardour for audio production, both at home and in studio and it does compare really well to Cubase or ProTools (I never tried Logic, though)
- I used Scribus for producing CD covers and sending them to print
- My wife and myself use Darktable for all our photographic needs, including some paid work
- I use the GIMP from time to time and never felt too limited.

But if there's one thing I've NEVER been happy with, it's video editing. While kdenlive is very capble, feature-wise it's in no way comparable to FinalCut or Premiere. There was Cinelerra, but the interface is very dated and it's almost abandoned. A very promising software is PiTiVi, but seeing how the latest fund-raising campaign struggles, one would think there's no one wanting a solid video editing software on Linux.
It's a shame because it's one of those few pieces of software we don't have in FOSS, along with 3D CAD software (again, there are many projects but they never get mature enough...)

I hear you! I do some video editing (mostly desktop recording, cutting, noise removal and transcoding to final) and evaluated all the GUI solutions I found (OpenShot, Kdenlive, PiTiVi, RecordMyDesktop and a few more). None of them produced an output I was comfortable with (if at all) and most of them crashed on me. Very frustrating! Desktop recording even more so. Ever tried to record a video that muxes audio from the system and an external USB mic? Fun stuff.. prepare to Google around for two days.

I ended up with a combination of scripts that call avconv (fork of ffmpeg) to record to webm files, cut and transcode them, audacity to fix the noise that my system generates (which I suspect comes from the soundcard or the sound server, not sure), and mkvmerge to put it all together.

It's quite a long and tedious process, but I found no meaningful OSS GUI alternatives and now it works quite well.

[rmeakins]

It appears the launchpad is actually rather active as of late, as the lead developer has been working primarily on libopenshot and merging up some updates to the bazaar. Latest post was on February 5, 2015, with commits pushed to the bazaar earlier today.

You're absolutely right - Jonathon has just updated kickstsrter

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...project_update