Pitivi 2020.09 Video Editor Released With Better Stability, Many New Features

[linuxgeex]

What are missing:
- Stabilizer for some shaking clips
- Text editor could include more typography effects (still unable to edit outlines, shadow)

2 glaring errors / omissions I found when I tried the flatpak:

1) no way to scale the time scale of a group, and no way to set the default import duration of an image. This makes working with imported images extremely tedious
2) transitions only use linear time (no easing) and rounding errors in the compositing math. These lead to jarring transitions, which is very unpleasant. When your non-linear video editor can't perform a crossfade as smoothly as your web browser... ouch.

The preview also detached itself from the editor, and became a separate window which ends up behind the editor when you interact with it. Making that window always on top allows you to scrub, but each time you render the window is closed and re-opens, losing that property. That's a pretty big papercut.

[Mike Frett]

These editors are too complex and busy for me, all those buttons are scary. I use Avidemux for everything.

[ed31337]

One thing that bugged me about Linux video editors was that none of them seem to support lossless video editing. Most of the time, I just want to cut out one part of a video that I liked and found worth saving. Doing this causes the content to get re-encoded in all of these video editors though. The result is a file that is not only inferior in quality from the original, since video compression is lossy, but also often turns out to be bigger than the full original video file! At that point, what's the point of editing the file in the first place?

When I searched around, I only came up with one lossless video editor, and it required electron or something. I passed on that.

Now I use ffmpeg command line options to cut my video files down losslessly. But ffmpeg from the command line is kind of mind numbing.

[Leprechaunius]

This is ridiculous. Why do we need so many opensource video editors that do the same? Openshot, Shotcut, Pitivi, Kdenlive, Olive, Flowblade, Something Something...

[kuco]

Shotcut works best for my usecase. Pitivi and OpenShot were unstable and/or resulted in "crackling" audio. I'm still missing some Adobe-Premiere-Pro features, but I don't want to go back to dual-booting.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

I used to follow these movie editors years ago and despite them claiming becoming more stable with each update release they were still far from usable.

This remind me about Novacut Kickstarter, that never become usable (or stable) in first place.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTYyNQ

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTcxOA

I even asked people to publish news about this project, some probably backed this project and lost money, so I feel bad about this one. But I also believed and I also lost money.

[arQon]

I used to follow these movie editors years ago and despite them claiming becoming more stable with each update release they were still far from usable. I'd only listen to the opinion of someone who does this for a living, tries out Pitivi and reports back.

Exactly my experience with them as well. "More stable" may well be true, but when the starting point is "it crashes every 5 minutes", an improvment to "crashes every TEN minutes" instead just means it now loses 5 minutes more work each time.

Teams either build quality software from the start, or they don't. A team that has repeatedly shown it thinks releasing garbage is an acceptable way of working will never change that mentality unless it gets new leaders who believe otherwise. Without that it's just lip service at best, and DIStrusting it is the only sensible approach until the actions have been shown to match the words for long enough for such teams to earn some credibility.
It CAN happen, but it's rare that it actually does: once you have a culture of "meh, it's good enough" in place, it's VERY hard for a team to break out of it.

[finalzone]

Eh! Amazing that some posts failed to bother trying the new release of Pitivi via Flatpak by talking about other video editor.
Notable changes are:
- New interactive tutorial for new users
- Improved and more intuitive transformation layout allowing keyframe on any clip including text
- Improved Drag and Drop
- Simplified effect library layout
- Simplified render dialog with two presets (DVD and Youtube), selection of quality from low to high and toggle advanced functions for customization

What are missing:
- Stabilizer for some shaking clips
- Text editor could include more typography effects (still unable to edit outlines, shadow)

Overall
A very good video editor aimed to usersz looking for quick composition like story telling or documentary.

[zxy_thf]

I used to follow these movie editors years ago and despite them claiming becoming more stable with each update release they were still far from usable. I'd only listen to the opinion of someone who does this for a living, tries out Pitivi and reports back.

I'm really in doubt who is brave enough to be an early adopter of pitivi. When I was trying 0.995 It crashed everyday and may ruin my whole afternoon's effort.
Stability should be production applications' top priority, and unfortunately pitivi failed to meet this requirement.

[andrei_me]

I'm very happy with Kdenlive, which itself was updated some weeks ago.

I have no experience in content creation, I knew what I wanted to do, looked for some tutorials in youtube and managed to do what I wanted with Kdenlive successfully, everything went smoothly 👍🏻