Lightworks 14.1 In Beta For Linux Video Editing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lightworks 14.1 In Beta For Linux Video Editing

For fans of the Lightworks commercial-grade non-linear video editing software, their first beta update of the 14.1 series is now available...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lightworks-14.1-Beta

[microcode]

Remember when they said they were going to make it open source, then said that they would make some of it open source, then backpedaled on that too? I don't mean to stir the pot, but it seems to me that many of their promises go unfulfilled.

Hopefully this time they will do what they're saying they will, I wish them all the best.

[Licaon]

Maybe this one will actually start on Debian...

[chilinux]

Remember when they said they were going to make it open source, then said that they would make some of it open source, then backpedaled on that too? I don't mean to stir the pot, but it seems to me that many of their promises go unfulfilled.

Hopefully this time they will do what they're saying they will, I wish them all the best.

I think it has become clear at this point they had no intention of actually releasing it under Open Source and they leveraged the multiple times they made the announcement as a cheap marketing gimmick. Every time the issue has come up on their own forums, the forum moderator points to their FAQ as proof that open source is still on the road-map and then quickly locks the thread. This behavior seems to be for the purpose of being able to control their specific misleading narrative and avoid being called out for their lie. Clearly willful manipulation based on fraud is not beneath those at EditShare.

As to the LIghtworks product itself, when I tried it there was clear indications of the port to Linux being of low quality. Several show stoppers bugs appeared when using basic features. Other critical items such a fine-grain granular control of the H.264 encoder for exporting was missing. Providing a fixed set of predefined encoder profiles might be acceptable if your product is called something like "Windows Movie Maker" but when claiming to provide a commercial grade solution it really just does not cut it.

If more people took the money they waste on this product and gave it to the developers of OpenShot, we would have a much better quality editor with more flexibility in no time.

[DDF420]

As to the LIghtworks product itself, when I tried it there was clear indications of the port to Linux being of low quality. Several show stoppers bugs appeared when using basic features. Other critical items such a fine-grain granular control of the H.264 encoder for exporting was missing. Providing a fixed set of predefined encoder profiles might be acceptable if your product is called something like "Windows Movie Maker" but when claiming to provide a commercial grade solution it really just does not cut it.

If more people took the money they waste on this product and gave it to the developers of OpenShot, we would have a much better quality editor with more flexibility in no time.

Yes for most people the free version offering MPEG4/H.264 - max. resolution: 1280x720p pixels is just fine. want more control?Pay for it you skinflint!! Openshot got a boost of money and the final result was worse than it originally was.

[chilinux]

Yes for most people the free version offering MPEG4/H.264 - max. resolution: 1280x720p pixels is just fine. want more control?Pay for it you skinflint!! Openshot got a boost of money and the final result was worse than it originally was.

I had payed for a license and as you implied that unlocked more resolutions. However, that didn't unlock all the encoding options I would have expected from a commercial grade h.264 video encoder. There was nothing to provide a specific bitrate or to set it to do additional processing to achieve higher compression. On the other hand, when I used ffmpeg to edit videos (such as to do fades and watermarking), all of the options of the x264 encoder was available to me for tweaking. The bottom line became that Lightworks was adding noticeable digital artifacts which didn't appear in original source material and didn't appear in the ffmpeg output. So while you might like to throw around words like "skinflint," it should be noted that you don't always get what you pay for. The free ffmpeg results were much more professional looking than what was being produced by Lightworks.

The payments also don't stop at just the license. It become quickly apparent when using Lightworks for Linux that the product user interface is not up to par with other competing products. To address this, they recommend buying input accessories. One is a keyboard that cost over $140 which feels similar to cheap $20 rubber membrane keyboards with a spongy feel to the keys which you need to fully press down to register a response. The only upside to the keyboard is they applied hotkey icon stickers to the keys. It would have been nice if they could just supply the sticker separately so the stickers could just be applied to a keyboard with mechanical cherry switches that is actually worth $100+. Then there is also a $100+ Lightworks Shuttle "Pro" which partly makes up for the poor keyboard/mouse support in the interface but still doesn't bring the product up to being competitive with the UI of other products. So while I can understand how a shuttle dial can help when video editing, it shouldn't be used an excuse to keep an user interface crippled just to encourage users to buy more overpriced crap.

By the way, for those that just want to spend like there is no tomorrow, Lightworks recommends a $2,800 Lightworks Console! Feel free to call me a skinflint for not buying it but the product only works with Lightworks and was not going to address the numerous other issues I had with the video editor.

There is sooo much more I want to rant about Lightworks/EditShare but it is probably best that I leave it at this for now.

As to Openshot getting "worse," anyone can contribute or fork the Openshot project if they want to change things unlike Lightworks which locks you into going through their poor support and leaves you praying they will address your feedback.