Open Source Video Editor Pitivi Seeks Crowdfunding to Reach 1.0

Eloquence writes "Pitivi is perhaps the most mature, stable and actually usable open source video editor out there. They're now looking to raise funds to support the project's ongoing development. The lack of decent open source video editors has been one of the things keeping people locked into proprietary platforms, and video editing has been identified as a high priority project by the Free Software Foundation. 2014 may still not be the fabled year of the Linux desktop, but here's hoping it'll be the year of open source video editing." Work continues as well on the crowdfunded transition to cross-platform, open-source video editing with OpenShot, and developer Jonathan Thomas is presenting the work done so far at SCALE this weekend.

not a fan

[Gravis Zero]

Python is not suited for every task and video editing is one of the things that should be exclusively in native code.

You already have Blender 3D...

[MindPrison]

...which is as far as I know, one of the most stable and compatible Video Editors out there (free & open source & GPL and all that jazz). www.blender.org

Yes yes...it's 3D software, but it has a very functional, totally unlimited video-editing suite built right in, very easy to use too...you don't need to learn how to use Blender, but you need to learn a bit about video formats, compression and such.

Re:not a fan

[Mathieu_Du]

And that's why python is only used for laying out the user interface, and all the heavy lifting is done by GStreamer and gst-editing-services. I invite you to research that ;)

Very enthusiastic about that effort !

[Mathieu_Du]

Disclaimer : I'm one of the Pitivi's developers, and I'm very excited about that campaign. We feel like Pitivi's technological choices (being based on GStreamer), and its large community make it the most promising open source video editing application out there ! I encourage you to visit our website for that campaign at http://fundraiser.pitivi.org/ [pitivi.org] , as we've put a lot of effort into explaining all this in details !

Re:Pitivi is such a POS

[ssam]

While Cinelerra is very capable, it also seems to be an unmaintainable code dump. The community project can just about get it in a state that it builds, but I am not aware that they have added any features to it. IIRC the community devs though it would be better to start again from scatch, with a project called something like Luminara, but I can't find much about that now.

On the other hand Pitivi is build on a solid base of libraries that are used widely in other peices of software. Even if pitivi were not to succede then it would have created the tools for other people to build an editor. It also provides a base of libraries for experimental editors like Nova cut.

Re:Very enthusiastic about that effort !

[Mathieu_Du]

I'd much rather have "everything crashing down" than having to debug an inconsistent state where multiple *processes* run and some silently crash .. GStreamer is multithreaded, and that brings us the benefits of parallel execution without the "advantage" that you describe and that I perceive as a drawback. Regarding hardware acceleration, a lot of work is being done by multiple industry players to bring it to GStreamer, it's indeed quite new but things are moving fast !

Re:not a fan

[Anonymous Coward]

Where the hell did you get that idea? All performance critical code is in the media framework and codecs layer (Gstreamer for Pitivi, MLT for KDEnlive and Flowblade). Python code does things like "add clip to track","seek to frame 3452","start playback from current frame". There is zero need to to do CPU intensive tasks in Python code when programming video editors.