Lightworks 14.6 Remains A Closed-Up Blob, But At Least The Linux Support Continues

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lightworks 14.6 Remains A Closed-Up Blob, But At Least The Linux Support Continues

It was nearly a decade ago the high-end, commercial video software editing solution Lightworks announced they would be going open-source but to this day that milestone has yet to be materialized. Lightworks though does continue advancing with their v14.6 release on the horizon and at least their added Linux support continues to be expanded upon...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lightworks-14.6-Beta-2

[HenryM]

Huh. it's already in the AUR, too. I understand it is free-to-use but output resolution is restricted to 720p without a license?

[DeeZiD]

Huh. it's already in the AUR, too. I understand it is free-to-use but output resolution is restricted to 720p without a license?

Use Resolve 16 then.
Free allows up to UHD for output but doesn't have hardware acceleration for H264/H265 playback. Using the studio version anyway which even decodes 6K 10 bit H265 footage flawlessly.

[dkasak]

I investigate the Linux video editing options every so often. I always end up using blender ( and I always try everything else first ). It's quite complex, and doesn't have as many out-of-the-box transitions, but it's bug-free ( for my purposes ) and also has good preview performance for those pesky .MTS files which I always seem to get handed ... both of which puts it a long way ahead of the other open-source options. From memory, the last time I tried Lighwworks, it had issues synchronising my audio and video, with no obvious ways of rectifying.

[chilinux]

Who in their right mind still considers Lightworks high-end? What does it do that Adobe doesn't already do better?

EditShare did not just make an announcement they would be going open source. The forum administrators working for EditShare doubled down on that the community would need to be patient and they were still working on the open source release. It was a lengthy marketing scam that went on for years. It had been announced in spring of 2010 and by fall of 2011 they indicated the source code release was only "delayed."

If they had begun working on open sourcing Lightworks at the time of the announcement, Lightworks v11 would be on github by now. The fact that they are now on version 14 and still can't release the source code to v11 clearly shows there was never going to be an open source release "milestone." There was no ball dropped as much as they only pretended there was a ball to begin with.

The Linux "support" is also questionable. Lightworks has frequent excuses why the Linux port tends to be buggy. They also have indicated that Boris FX or Boris Graffiti is available with Lightworks but only for users that use Windows or Mac OS X. Linux users must pay the same price but not get the same additional features.

As to it being feature-rich or "professional" grade, the interface is complete crap.

Just look at this keyboard they sell to try to help make up for the confusing interface. I have come to expect cherry mx switches or better when paying $100 or more for a keyboard. Lightworks gets away with selling a rubber membrane keyboard worth $20 for $145 because their software is close to impossible to use without it.

If each company using Lightworks contributed $175 per year to an open source video product such a kdenlive instead of wasting money on Lightworks, then we would probably see the open source projects exceed the capabilities of Lightworks in about a year.