Lightworks Is Not As Open As Some Would Like

[Luke]

I haven't had sync issues since 2008

When Kdenlive works, it's beautiful. Not perfect, but an interface and workflow that I love (far more than that of Lightworks). That said, for many video formats, they look fine when you're editing, but lose more and more sync between audio and video as you get past about a minute of rendering. I've tried for literally *weeks* to fix problems with this, more than once over many years (including just a couple of months ago). The problem is that it doesn't just shift the audio earlier or later, but also speeds it up or slows it down. It makes it into an absolute nightmare to try and fix, and of course you often don't even discover the problem until you're just about finished a project, have invested a lot of time into it and now don't have the time to migrate elsewhere.

I haven't had THAT issue since the KDE 3.5 versions in Ubunty Gutsy and Hardy! Since then, in OS's ranging from Ubuntu Jaunty all the way to Cinnamon over Ubuntu Trusty (14.04), and on machines from Intel Atom to AMD Athlon 64 all the way to AMD FX 8120, I've never had this problem again. Source files have been motion jpegs, AVCHD with H264 streams, even downloaded flv files. The only time I had sync/speed issues were with some H264 streams transferred out of .MTS containers into MP4 containers about a year ago, when doing this from the ffmpeg command line made files something in Kdenlive or MLT didn't like. These had severe speed issues, switching to .flv containers fixed that. Finally, sometime last summer the orignal MTS files from my camera because usable without seek issues getting to a starting point on playback of the timeline, so now I use them directly.

The old KDE3.5 versions had to very bad bugs: the sync issues, (which could be worked around by using a 25fps project rate and setting the camera for 25fps) and an ugly tendecy to narrow and pillerbox the files I was importing at that time. In 2008 I didn't know enough about video editing to find a fix for that, but the KDE4 versions of Kdenlive never had that problem anyway. If you haven't used Kdenlive since KDE3.5, try it again, you will be amazed at how far this wonderful program has come.

[Setlec]

Why don't they make a release for mingw then for the community to help?

well i guess they want an entire independent platform core source code. kinda like Nvidia blob, they have a huge pool of the driver source code that is usable for all platform. thinking like that it's way easier to maintain and improve then rewriting all.

[curaga]

I will be very interested to see how EditShare will handle the open source aspect of Lightworks, compared to their commercial version. I'm specifically thinking about formats/codecs here. For example DPX is a format I and companies I work for use a lot, and that is only available in the "Pro" version. What will happen if community implements support for DPX (and other formats) currently only offered in the paid version? I understand that formats like R3D requires a commercial license for redistribution, and therefore only available in the paid version, but I think it is silly that DPX - which is an open standard - is excluded from the free/open source version, as well as codecs that can potentially be covered by ffmpeg.

So again, will be interesting to see how "open source" EditShare allows it to be...

Good question, with the likely answer being "no, we like our open core", a short-lived fork with the added codecs, which then gets dropped when it takes too much time to update it to latest LW.

[Del_]

Please elaborate. For those of us who are not plagued by format-related bugs in kdenlive, what exactly is it that we are missing out on? What is it that LW has that makes it so superior?

[numasan]

I will be very interested to see how EditShare will handle the open source aspect of Lightworks, compared to their commercial version. I'm specifically thinking about formats/codecs here. For example DPX is a format I and companies I work for use a lot, and that is only available in the "Pro" version. What will happen if community implements support for DPX (and other formats) currently only offered in the paid version? I understand that formats like R3D requires a commercial license for redistribution, and therefore only available in the paid version, but I think it is silly that DPX - which is an open standard - is excluded from the free/open source version, as well as codecs that can potentially be covered by ffmpeg.

So again, will be interesting to see how "open source" EditShare allows it to be...

PS: There is no doubt that Lightworks isn't open source as it stands now, and while their intentions might be good, I don't like when companies use the term "Open Source" as a PR stunt, and worse yet if it turns out to be Microsoft's "Shared Source" (look but don't touch).

[ninez]

Have you bothered to look at the pricing page that he was linking to? It's not just codecs. Other features of the application are affected too.

have you? go and read it again, there are maybe 3 or 4 things that don't pertain plugins/licensed codecs (or are misc options that probably doesn't affect someone like yourself)... furthermore, some of 'misc ones' aren't really worth bitching about anyway ~ such as multiple-concurrent-licensing, community support, project-sharing or the h/w io options.... You wouldn't be using the H/W io options without the hardware and pro version anyway - and if you are too cheap to pay $40-60 for a license - you wouldn't own such hardware anyway....

Really, the only to things you _may_ be able to bitch about (once the dust has settled) is the FX-related options - but again, if you are too cheap to shell out $40-60 for that - then you should use some 'free as in crap' video-editor that is already available for you to use, free of charge

and it still doesn't change the fact, that that blog article is based on very few facts, lots of speculation and FUD.

if you read her latest posts about cairo/pango you will have made note of this (her talking to Lightworks developers; ESLightworks and Great white);

Oh, so you actually draw the shapes and widgets and all that using Cairo? That?s good news. I?m positively surprised, and I?m sorry then; you have to give me some slack for not having the source code to guess that one out and for seeing too many projects using their own drawing library.

translation: " oh, i don't know what i am talking about. It's surprising that what you guys are doing at EditShare, doesn't match up with my own speculations that i've blogged and bitched about in my article... and of course, adding the apology in there for her false-claims/speculation and asking for 'slack'. lol.

[kiddo]

nothing more than FUD ~ like with the assertion that the different versions will be severely crippled, yet the only difference is not having a commercially licensed plugin, installed ~ which you could easily purchase - if you needed them)

Have you bothered to look at the pricing page that he was linking to? It's not just codecs. Other features of the application are affected too.

[ninez]

I think you guys just missed the point of the original author's article entirely. Go re-read it (and the comments section is interesting too).

You think that gnome dev isn't aware of the legal mess EditShare is in when it comes to opening a 1M+ LoC codebase with 20 years of history? Come on, that guy isn't dumb

No, the main point of the article was that LW isn't an Open-Source project (which is true at this point, EditShare wouldn't argue that either. They've made it pretty clear too - just look at their roadmap). The rest of that gnome-devs article is nothing more than speculation. - whether or not that was his/her intention doesn't matter. it is still nothing more than speculation infused with zero facts... (and in other areas - it was nothing more than FUD ~ like with the assertion that the different versions will be severely crippled, yet the only difference is not having a commercially licensed plugin, installed ~ which you could easily purchase - if you needed them)... You suggesting that because it has an older code-base means that it is filled with code that can't be opened is nothing more than speculation - ie: you don't know that at all and neither does that Gnome-developer. period.

[zeke123]

Is it an Open Source Video Editor or not?

A lot of people including the author of this post are taken astray by things like KDEnlive and such but fail to address the MAIN reason of this post:

Is Lightworks an Open Source Video Editor? Yes or No?
The answer is NO.
Period.

Everything else you want to bring in the mix is for another time.

Lightworks plans are that it WILL BE EVENTUALLY open source.
That is great news.

But right now, at this moment, you can NOT call Lightworks an Open Source editor.
Which makes your title Is-Not-As-Open-As-Some-Would-Like very transparent putting the onus on the accusers rather than on the claim of Open Source Video Editor.
To be honest, the Edithshare folks are not the ones who refer to Lightworks as an Open Source video editor but rather the sharp as always FLOSS press.
The Edithshare damage control guy who is in the comment section even says it, they are not an Open Source Video Editor.

At worst they do a lite 'open washing' thats all. They never say they are Open Source but they throw in meaningless terminologies like The Lightworks Open Source initiative and The groundbreaking Lightworks Open Source project and thats a lot of Open Sourcey titles for something they dont claim is Open Source yet.
Welcome to Open Washing. Same principle as with Green.

Look, most likely this will never come through and the world will never get to see their brilliant code. They will keep it closed and simply sell a top notch video editors for Linux for those that really need it (are 85% of web users still considering themselves Web Creators because they have a hacked version of Photoshop?). I have no problems with that.
Thats a great thing for Linux I mean I use Skype every day on Linux because not all my video contacts are on Gmail. I buy Linux games.
Lightworks is welcome to make business in Linux land. It is not illegal. It is welcomed. I hope Adobe does as well.
We need Lightworks because it theoretically allows the minute group that is involved in that technology to have high quality programs.

But we also NEED true open source projects like KDEnlive from which other free-open software editors can take ideas and code and back and forth as opposed to the Googlefied version of top down open source communities should look like.
I dont foresee Lightworks every being that.
Which is fine.
It can be the nice fancy closed souce Linux program.
Thats part of a healthy Linux eco-system which is based and built on open code and standards but can be a business ground for pay software.

[Del_]

well, it was mostly about the ability to change the interface etc..., .

It is highly customizable, like most KDE programs. The toolbar can be configured by you, and you can arrange any functionality within kdenlive there exactly as you like. Likewise for the window, like common with Qt apps, you can rearrange the gui exactly as you please.

I need at least two clip previews to sync video and sound, kdenlive doesn't have that (as long I know and was documented back then)...

Not sure I understand what you mean. You can split up the clip monitor and the project monitor, but I don't know if that addresses your issue.

and really when I have 3 hours of HD video x 3 cameras, as an "amateur" I can't convert all my videos to lossless (you convert your video to lossless video, not lossless matroska which is just a container), that would just mean many tb, hdds and no chance of backing up...

I see. Terrabytes are cheap today, but I assume you would rather prefer finding a compressed format that behaves well in kdenlive. Shouldn't be too hard though, just ask in their forum.